wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes) (08/07/90)
Archive-name: galaxy-database/06-Aug-90
Original-posting-by: wayne@csri.toronto.edu (Wayne Hayes)
Original-subject: Galaxy Database Available, need ftp site
Reposted-by: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)
As I posted a few months ago, I have a database of about 8300 galaxies. I
would like to make it available by ftp, but I don't have write acces to any
local sites. If someone *can* make it available by ftp, then mail me
and I'll send a copy, and then I'll post again with the site info. Please
don't mail me asking for a personal copy before it's available by ftp.
The file is 375K, all ASCII text in the form of a table (about 170K
compressed). Here's the blurb that I put with it:
---
This file contains the following data for 8,436 galaxies: Name (sometimes
an NGC number, sometimes just the "RA+/-DEC" convention), right
ascenension in hours, minutes, seconds, and declination in degress,
minutes, seconds; then visual magnitude as seen from the Earth (ie,
*not* corrected for distance), and then radial velocity in kilometers
per second (negative indicates it's incomming, and positive indicates
it's receding). Some of the data is incomplete, as can be plainly
seen in the very first entry with a magnitude of 0.00 (don't we wish!).
The galaxies are sorted by right ascension.
The data was obtained originally by an article that I've lost track
of. It was by John Huchra and some others, in the Astrophysical Journal
some years ago. I have permission from John Huchra to release this (John,
I still owe you a beer!) There are far more complete surveys available,
but I haven't gone looking for a few years.
Some notes about the actual data: it is far from complete. It does
not cover the entire sky, and even in the parts that look "dense", there
are some pencil-beam surveys that are evident in a 3-D plot. (A pencil-
beam survey is a survey that covers a small portion of the sky but goes to
very dim magnitude. Thus in a 3-D plot you see "beams" of galaxies
eminating from the point that is the Milky Way.) There are some places
that are quite complete, the most obvious area being the Local Group,
which is quite detailed. It is really quite fascinating to write a
3-D program to look at the data.
Looking at the data: If anyone is interested, I wrote a simple 3-D
"flight simulator" for the Amiga that plots this data on screen while
you use the mouse to "fly" around the area at many millions of times
the speed of light :-). If there is enough interest, I could make the
program available also.
--
"The number of programs that can be done with the Hubble Space Telescope has
always greatly exceeded the time available for their execution, and this
remains true even with the telescope in its current state." -- HST Science
Working Group and User's Commitee Report, 1990 June 29.
Wayne Hayes INTERNET: wayne@csri.utoronto.ca CompuServe: 72401,3525