Note: USNO-A1.0 contains 488,006,860 sources, and was compiled from the blue/red overlaps of the detection lists generated from scans of POSS-I O and E plates (>=-30°) and SRC-J and ESO-R plates (<=-35°). USNO-A1.0 was created by Dave Monet () and collaborators at Flagstaff Station, U.S. Naval Observatory; it is superseded by the new PMM-USNO-A2.0 version. The VizieR search engine uses an on-line compressed version (3.4Gbytes) which was generated at CDS.
Note: USNO-A2.0 contains 526,280,881 sources, and is based on a re-reduction of the Precision Measuring Machine (PMM) scans from POSS-I O and E plates (>=-18°) and SRC-J and ESO-R plates (<=-20°). USNO-A2.0 was created by Dave Monet () and collaborators at Flagstaff Station, U.S. Naval Observatory. The major difference between USNO-A2.0 and its previous version USNO-A1.0 is that A1.0 used the Guide Star Catalog as its reference frame whereas A2.0 uses the ICRF as realized by the USNO ACT catalog (Urban et al. 1997). The VizieR search engine uses an on-line compressed version (3.6Gbytes) which was generated at CDS.
Note: The Guide Star Catalog has been constructed to support the operational need of the Hubble Space Telescope. It contains over 25 million positions for about 19 million objects, of which more than 15 million are classified as stars. The version 1.2 is a new astrometric reduction which results in absolute position errors about 0.3-0.4 arcsec. (see GSC pages at URL http://www-gsss.stsci.edu/gsc/gsc.html)
Note: The GSC-ACT (or GSC1.3) is a recalibration of the GSC1.1, the catalogue constructed to support the operational need of the Hubble Space Telescope, with the ACT, the combination of the Astrographic Catalogue and the Tycho catalogue derived from the Hipparcos mission; see http://www.projectpluto.com/gsc_act.htm for more details about this recalibration.
