[TASS] new versions of Mark III 'tenxcat' catalog available

[Stupendous Man <richmond@A188-L009.RIT.EDU>]

  I have finished work on the new version of the 'tenxcat' catalog.
This version uses observations from three sites (Batavia, Cincinnatti,
and Dayton), covering the period Oct 15, 1996 to Nov 19, 1998.
The catalog contains information on 367,241 stars, each of which was
detected at least 10 times in some combination of V, R, and I passbands;
this is an increase of about 80,000 stars over the previous version.

  Read about the catalog in a newly revised version of Tech Note 56:

        http://stupendous.rit.edu/tass/technotes/tn0056.html

  There is also a new companion catalog, based on suggestions from
several potential users of the data.  The "high-quality color subset"
contains only stars which

      - were observed >= 5 times in V-band AND  >= 5 times in I-band
      - have uncertainties of <= 0.20 mag in each magnitude, V and I

Its format is slightly different from that of the main catalog, too:

      - the RA and Dec are given in sexigesimal format:  HH:MM:SS
      - the magnitude information is presented as V-band mag and
               (V-I) color  [and (V-R) color, if measured]

  Both versions contain some new goodies:

      - GSC cross-IDs for all stars with a match
      - AC2000 cross-IDs, which are important mostly because they provide
           in turn ...
      - HD cross-IDs, with spectral types
      - IRAS Point Source Catalog cross-IDs

Only a small fraction of the stars have Henry Draper cross-IDs, of course,
but that still yields 7792 spectral types.  That ought to be of interest
to someone  ....

  The 'tenxcat' information is available via direct query into the
Postgres database, as before.  See Tech Note 56 for details.

  Now, this version of the catalog does NOT contain data from the
JHU Mark III triplet.  I apologize to Nick, Marty, and everyone else
at JHU.  They have sent me the data, but I just haven't had the time
to import it all and (this is the tought part) figure out the color
terms to correct their data.  I do plan on adding it to the database
sometime -- but probably not for a number of months.  There will be
a number of updates to the 'tenxcat' as time goes by and more data
is collected ... and the JHU information will be included in the next
update.

  Next up for me: write sections of the general-audience TASS paper
(which I've been putting off until this catalog was finished), and
then write the first draft of the technical TASS Mark III paper.

                                              Michael Richmond

P.S. as always, when I first make material available, I've probably
     screwed up in several places.  Please, if you poke around and
     discover a mistake, or something that needs fixing, send me
     E-mail directly:  mwrsps@rit.edu