CURSA is a package of Starlink applications for manipulating astronomical catalogues and similar tabular datasets. It provides facilities for: browsing or examining catalogues, selecting subsets from a catalogue, sorting catalogues, copying catalogues, pairing two catalogues, converting catalogue coordinates between some celestial coordinate systems, plotting finding charts and photometric calibration. Also, subsets can be extracted from a catalogue in a format suitable for plotting using other Starlink packages, such as PONGO. CURSA can access catalogues held in the popular FITS table format, the Tab-Separated Table (TST) format or the Small Text List (STL) format. Catalogues in the STL and TST formats are simple ASCII text files. CURSA also includes some facilities for accessing remote on-line catalogues via the Internet.

This manual describes how to use Version 6.4 of CURSA. Its intended readership is users and potential users of CURSA.

Applications

`xcatview`	browse and generate selections from a catalogue (X-windows, easy-to-use),
`catview`	browse and generate selections from a catalogue (command line),
`catselect`	select a subset from a catalogue,
`catcoord`	convert between celestial coordinate systems,
`catchart`	plot a finding chart,
`catchartrn`	set up ready for plotting a finding chart,
`catheader`	list various header information for a catalogue,
`catcopy`	copy a catalogue,
`catsort`	sort a catalogue,
`catpair`	pair two catalogues,
`catgrid`	bin one, two or three columns into a histogram, image or data cube,
`catphotomfit`	define photometric transformation coefficients,
`catphotomtrn`	apply photometric transformation coefficients to programme objects,
`catphotomlst`	list photometric transformation coefficients,
`catcdsin`	convert a CDS text catalogue to STL format,
`catgscin`	convert a region in the HST Guide Star Catalog to a more convenient format,
`catremote`	access remote on-line catalogues.

Catalogue formats

Expressions

arithmetic operators: + - * / **
relational operators: .EQ. .NE. .GE. .GT. .LE. .LT. == /= >= > <= <
logical (boolean) operators:

.AND. .OR. .NOT. &
 $|$  #

brackets: use brackets, ‘(’, ‘)’, as appropriate,
sexagesimal values: use a colon (‘:’) to separate hours/degrees, minutes and seconds. Unsigned values are interpreted as hours; values in degrees must always have a sign (‘+’ or ‘-’). Sexagesimal values are converted to radians prior to evaluating the expression.
great circle distance: GREAT(

α_{1}, δ_{1}

α_{2}, δ_{2}

)
position angle of point

(α_{2}, δ_{2})

from point

(α_{1}, δ_{1})

: PANGLE(

α_{1}, δ_{1}

α_{2}, δ_{2}

)

CURSA home page and on-line documentation

A ‘home page’ giving useful information about CURSA is available via the World Wide Web. Its URL is:

An on-line version of SUN/190 (this manual) is also available via the World Wide Web. On Starlink systems type:

Assistance and further information

If you are experiencing difficulties using CURSA then in the first instance you should probably seek advice and assistance from your local site manager. Bug reports should be sent to username:

Bug reports should always be sent to username starlink@jiscmail.ac.uk. However, you are welcome to contact me directly for advice and assistance. Suggestions for enhancements and improvements to CURSA are also welcome. Details of how to contact me are given below.

Postal address: Institute for Astronomy, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh,

Acknowledgments

CURSA is far from being all my own work. Clive Page, Rodney Warren-Smith and Alan Wood have all been involved in aspects of its development. Indeed, Clive Page wrote the expression parser which CURSA uses, and Appendix A is based on documentation which he supplied. Malcolm Currie and Anne Sansom tested an early version of xcatview and suggested several significant improvements. Numerous other people have made useful contributions.

Various items of external software have been introduced into version 3.1 of CURSA which it is a pleasure to acknowledge. catremote accesses remote on-line catalogues using the catlib library developed by Allan Brighton, Miguel Albrecht and colleagues at the European Southern Observatory. Patrick Wallace gave useful advice and assistance during the development of catcoord and this application uses his SLA library to convert between celestial coordinate systems. catchart uses Tim Pearson’s PGPLOT to produce its plots. Last, but not least, FITS tables continue to be accessed using Bill Pence’s invaluable FITSIO library. I am also grateful to the numerous people who have commented on, and suggested improvements to, CURSA.

I am grateful to John Lucey for useful discussions about photometric calibration and for kindly providing the data used in the example catalogue of observations of photometric standard stars. Peter Draper gave helpful comments on the section of the manual describing the photometric calibration.

Revision history

References

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[19] H. Meyerdierks, D.S. Berry, P.W. Draper, G.J. Privett and M.J. Currie, 14 February 1997, SUN/194.2: PDA — Public Domain Algorithms, Starlink.

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[21] F. Ochsenbein, 12 September 1994, Astronomical Catalogues at CDS: Adopted Standards, version 1.4, p14. Available on-line from the CDS (see Section 2).

[22] J. Palmer and A.C. Davenhall, 31 August 2001, SC/6.4: The CCD Photometric Calibration Cookbook, Starlink.

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[26] K.T. Shortridge, H. Meyerdierks, M.J. Currie, M.J. Clayton, J. Lockley, A.C. Charles, A.C. Davenhall, M.B. Taylor, T. Ash, T. Wilkins, D. Axon, J. Palmer, A. Holloway and V. Graffagnino, 31 October 2001, SUN/86.19: FIGARO — A General Data Reduction System, Starlink.

[27] R.W. Sinnott, 1988, NGC 2000.0 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and Sky Publishing Corporation: Cambridge, Massachusetts).

[28] D.L. Terrett and N. Eaton, 12 July 1995, SUN/57.8: GNS – Graphics Workstation Name Service, Starlink.

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[31] P.T. Wallace, 21 June 1995, SUN/56.10: COCO — Conversion of Celestial Coordinates, Starlink.

[32] P.T. Wallace, 17 October 2000, SUN/67.51: SLALIB — Positional Astronomy Library, Starlink.

[33] R.F. Warren-Smith, 11 January 2000, SUN/33.7: NDF — Routines for Accessing the Extensible N-Dimensional Data Format, Starlink.

[34] R.F. Warren-Smith and D.S. Berry, 23 May 2000, SUN/210.7: AST — A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy (Fortran Version), Starlink.

[35] R.F. Warren-Smith and D.S. Berry, 23 May 2000, SUN/211.7: AST — A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy (C Version), Starlink.

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Abstract

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