NAME: rdstarc PURPOSE: Read refnet based star catalog files. DESCRIPTION: Read star catalog file - there are a number of options and consequences of running this. The input file can be either in ASCII tabular format or in binary format. If the file is ASCII you MUST use /NOCONVERT if you do not want the input file to be modified. Otherwise, it will be converted to the most appropriate binary format file using starcprmt before it is read. There are two types of ASCII files. The old version dating back from the USNO catalog days, does not contain any proper motion information. This form of file will naturally map into the v1.0 format file with no loss of information. This file has 10 columns of data of which only the first 8 are ever examined. The other two columns were for backward compatibility for some long-forgotten software. These columns are optional and are ignored if present. The 7 columns that are read are: col Contents 0-2 -- Right ascension (H, M, S) 3-5 -- Declination (D, M, S). 6 -- Blue magnitude 7 -- Red magnitude The second type of ASCII file is from Gaia DR1. It has 11 columns of information and is a newly designed format. During conversion to binary form, one of two things can happen. If you provide EPOCH, the proper motion and parallax is applied to the catalog positions and the resulting coordinates are saved in the v1.0 binary format. If you do not provide EPOCH, all of the input information is kept and sent back to the user. In this latter case, the information comes back in the INFO return structure and the formal arguments are populated with the catalog information that maps to these arguments but they really aren't of much use. The columns in the file are: col Contents 0 Right ascension (encoded as a single sexigesimal string, H:M:S) 1 Declination (encoded as a single sexigemsimal string, D:M:S) 2 RA proper motion (arcsec/year) 3 Dec proper motion (arcsec/year) 4 Parallax (arcsec) 5 RA uncertainty (arcsec) 6 Dec uncertainty (arcsec) 7 RA proper motion uncertainty (arcsec/year) 8 Dec proper motion uncertainty (arcsec/year) 9 Parallax uncertainty (arcsec) 10 G magnitude If you use NOCONVERT, you must use the full info structure on return CATEGORY: Astrometry CALLING SEQUENCE: rdstarc,starfile,ra,dec,bmag,rmag,nstars INPUTS: starfile - Name of file to read. OPTIONAL INPUT PARAMETERS: KEYWORD INPUT PARAMETERS: SILENT - Flag, if set suppresses all non-error output. NOCONVERT - Flag, if set, suppresses converting to binary format. Only works if the file is not already binary. If it's binary the program dies most unpleasantly. OUTPUTS: ra - right ascension in radians (J2000) dec - declination in radians (J2000) bmag - Blue magnitude rmag - Red magnitude (see the USNO A2.0 catalog docs to see what this means) nstars - Number of stars found (can be zero- in this case other outputs not defined). KEYWORD OUTPUT PARAMETERS: COMMON BLOCKS: SIDE EFFECTS: RESTRICTIONS: There is no version control or fancy validation provided if you bypass conversion. You really should use this only for tiny files where you really need to maintain the ASCII version. This is NOT a normal usage. PROCEDURE: MODIFICATION HISTORY: Written by Marc W. Buie, Lowell Observatory, 2002/01/07 02/03/10 - MWB, added nstars return value 2007/11/23- Peter L. Collins, Lowell Observatory, convert to v1.0 binary fmt and add promote call. 2008/10/21, MWB, added SILENT keyword 2014/03/18, MWB, added NOCONVERT keyword 2016/11/05, MWB, added support for proper motion and parallax 2018/07/16, MWB, added reading of Gaia star "id" 2020/07/08, MWB, fixed case where info structure was accidentally overwritten 2021/01/28, MWB, fixes a case reading an empty catalog file 2022/02/25, MWB, used EPOCH to add proper motion corrected positions to the output structure for the GAIA DR2/3 case.