BAIT: bright command

NAME

bright - locates bright stars

SYNOPSIS

bright ra=hh:mm:ss dec=dd:mm:ss [epoch=1950] [bright=#] [faint=#] [box=#] [help] [north=#] [south=#] [nearest=#] [fk5] [sao] [visible]

DESCRIPTION

This program looks up the nearest bright star from the Yale bright star catalog, the FK5 (if fk5 option is selected) or the SAO catalog (with the sao option). All coordinates are corrected for proper motion to the current epoch

The output is a single line with a format similar to the following:

12:05:00.303 +08:45:18.63 1996.00 4.12 450 3.470

where the first, second, and fields are the ra and dec and epoch (1950.0), the fourth field is the V magnitude, the fifth field is the SAO star number, and the last field is the B magnitude (I think).

The box flag changes the mode of operation slightly in that all stars within the specified box size are printed out (in order of increasing R.A.).

OPTIONS

fk5 selects the FK5 star catalog instead of the Yale.

sao selects the SAO star catalog instead of the Yale.

ra= hh:mm:ss specifies center search R.A.

dec= dd:mm:ss specifies center search declination.

epoch= yyyy specifies the optional epoch (default: 1950)

bright= # where # is the magnitude of the brightest star to search for (def=-1.5).

faint= # where # is the faintest star magnitude to search for (def=6.5 for Yale)

box= # prints all stars within the specified box of # degrees on each side.

north= specifies optional north declination limit

south= specifies optional south declination limit

nearest= specifies that the nearest star (in the catalog) must be less than the specified number of degrees.

visible selects only the star(s) that are within the telescope limits specified by the TELLIME, TELLIMW, TELLIMN, TELLIMN and TELLIMA in the file ait.config. The local sidereal time is calculated from the local system clock for he current instant.

FILES

The original catalog is hatcat.srt which contains in ASCII a listing of

SAO_number ra dec pm_ha pm_dec error mag

where the ra is in decimal hours, dec in decimal degrees (epoch 1950). The proper motion is in seconds of ra and seconds of arc per year for the r.a. and declination respectively. Lines with the `#' character at the beginning of the line are skipped. The program makecat converts this ASCII form to binary structures used by the bright program.

The environment variable CATALOGHOME should be set to point to the directory in which hatcat.bin resides. The default value is the current working directory.

BUGS

The behavior around R.A. 0 and 24 hours may not correct properly for wrap-around.

There are some variable stars present in the catalog, which have not been commented out.