readable bright star catalogue

pox
Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Thu, 11/23/2017 - 20:47

Does anyone know where I can obtain a readable / csv / text copy of our very own Dorrit's BSC? Every version I have seen so far does not look like a standard .csv or fixed-width format file. Looking at it in Notepad just looks like ASCII chaos. Surely someone somewhere has converted it to a standard format (Excel, Access, MySQL etc)!

I am planning to write a PHP app which shows the user what the night sky looks like from other stars and so need a consistent set of data (doesn't have to be necessarily 2000 epoch. The version I used (inputting by hand!) was taken from Becvar but many of the fainter/southern stars have no parallax, essential for the algorithm.

Roger__Pieri
Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
CDS ?

Hi Michael,

The CDS VizieR distribution (V/50 Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (Hoffleit+, 1991)) and choosing " ; separated values"  looks very well machine readable, no ?

http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR

Clear Skies !

Roger