Star Catalog distribution Optimum performance is achieved by having the star catalogs used in the sky view window available on a local disk. When these are not present, the program attempts to use the internet to obtain catalog data from Carnegie Observatories, and saves the data found on the local disk (See the "Star Catalog Server" explanation in mginstr.txt). There is a slight performance degradation when this is done, so having your own local copy of our star catalog information improves performance and avoids long time-out waits if the internet is not available. Having this data is thus useful, but not required. With our faster internet connection, it is now practical to distribute our star catalog set over the internet. Due to file size limitations, there are two compressed tar files which contain all the catalog data. These files are located on our FTP server (ftp.obs.carnegiescience.edu) at pub/clardy/gcats1.tgz pub/clardy/gcats2.tgz Each file should take from 1.5 to 3 hours to download, and we prefer that this downloading be done in the late evening to early morning hours Pacific Time. Once you have these two files, find a suitable directory which will be readable by all users and have at least 4.3 gigabytes of space available. Then cd to that target directory, and do this: > gtar xfz /wherever/gcats1.tgz > gtar xfz /wherever/gcats2.tgz which should extract all the star catalog information, and construct the needed directory structure. The extraction and writing of this data should take about 5 to 15 minutes per file on most systems. Both files are needed for a successful installation. A suitable directory will be one on a large, fast server disk to which all users will have easy access. Please note that this catalog data is not changed when the maskgen software is updated. One download will suffice for the foreseeable future -- at least several more years. A special announcement will be made in the rare case that new catalog data is issued. To use these catalogs in intgui, each user should have the environment variable GMAPCATS set to the target directory, or alternatively a symbolic link may be set up at /usr/local/etc/gcats which points to the target directory. The environment variable CATPATH can also be used. Since this distribution method is new, I would appreciate user feedback on how long the download actually took, and whether you successfully unpacked and used the catalogs. Send your download times and comments to: clardy (at) obs.carnegiescience.edu