W. H. Warren

DIVISION XII / COMMISSION 5 / WORKING GROUP DESIGNATIONS

At the 2003 Sydney IAU meeting, Marion Schmitz (Caltech, USA) took over the chair of the Commission 5 Working Group Designations, succeeding Helene Dickel. The Working Group Designations of IAU Commission 5 clarifies existing astronomical nomenclature and helps astronomers avoid potential problems when designating their sources. The most important function of WG Designations during the period 2003-2005 was overseeing the IAU REGISTRY FOR ACRONYMS (for newly discovered astronomical sources of radiation: see the website http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/DicForm >) which is sponsored by the WG and operated by the Centre de Donnees de Strasbourg (CDS). The Clearing House, a subgroup of the WG, screens the submissions for accuracy and conformity to the IAU Recommendations for Nomenclature ( http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/iau-spec.html >). From its beginning in 1997 through August 2006, there have been 132 submissions and 111 acceptances. Attempts to register asterisms, common star names, and suspected variable stars were rejected. The past three years saw 61 acronyms submitted with 50 of them being accepted. (GIRL - yes; WOMEN - no).

Responsibilities and Practical Limitations in the Operation of an Astronomical Data Center

The operation of an astronomical data center requires that many decisions be made concerning the handling of the astronomical catalogs and data distributed. Should a data center be, as Wilkins (1977) described it, passive, in that catalogs and data are collected and distributed blackbox-wise upon request, or should a data center be active and have experts in various fields to scrutinize, correct, reformat, and document data where necessary? These questions will be addressed and illustrated by describing the current operations and future goals of the Astronomical Data Center at NASA/GSFC.

The Machine-Readable Durchmusterungen: Classical Catalogs in Contemporary Form

The entire series of Durchmusterung (DM) catalogs (Bonner, Southern, Cordoba, Cape Photographic) has been computerized through a collaborative effort among institutions and individuals in France and the United States of America. Complete verification of the data, both manually and by computer, the inclusion of all supplemental stars (represented by lower case letters), complete representation of all numerical data, and a consistent format for all catalogs, should make this collection of machine-readable data a valuable addition to digitized astronomical archives.

The Use of Machine-Readable Astronomical Catalogs at Small Observatories

The development of computer controlled telescopes at small observatories has dramatically increased the demand for and potential usefulness of astronomical catalogs in machine-readable form. The compilation and storage of catalogs containing program and standard stars are obvious necessities for the operation of an automatic telescope, but to date most observers have been collecting their own data and manually entering them into microcomputer disk storage. (This is clear from the small number of machine catalogs distributed by the ADC to smaller observatories.) Astronomical data centers located in several countries around the world currently archive, maintain and disseminate a wide variety of machine catalogs in virtually every discipline of astronomy, and these facilities can provide observers with nearly any kind of data needed for controlling telescopes (positional catalogs), reducing data (catalogs of all types of photometry, spectroscopy, etc.) and providing access to fundamental quantities needed for the interpretation of observations (catalogs of binaries, variables, radial and rotational velocities, etc.). The ADC presently has approximately 450 machine catalogs in its archives and these are available to observatories upon request. Procedures for obtaining data from the ADC and policies for distribution are described in this paper, while a list of all catalogs available can be obtained by contacting the ADC.

The Astronomical Data Base and Retrieval System at NASA

More than 250 machine-readable catalogs of stars and extended celestial objects are now available at the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) as the result of over a decade of catalog acquisition, verification and documentation. Retrieval programs are described which permit the user to obtain from a remote terminal bibliographical listings for stars; to find all celestial objects from a given list that are within a defined angular separation from each object in another list; to plot celestial objects on overlays for sky survey plate areas; and to search selected catalogs for objects by criteria of position, identification number, magnitude or spectral type.