XEphem's primary philosophy regarding catalogs is to emphasize astrometry rather than astrophysics. Nomenclature and physical information are supported only at a bare minimal level. The idea being that there is a diverse and ever growing morphology of "things" out there and one can learn all about them from the appropriate sources, but XEphem will try hard to at least tell you where they are.

In the case of the Tycho catalog, its numbers were sacrificed from XEphem's compressed version because the catalog does not go very deep, so almost all of the stars it contains have other names already in common use in the literature. To be faithful to our philosophy we chose not to capture these designations but rather to keep the file size at the minimum that would preserve primarily the excellent proper motion information of the Tycho mission.

Elwood Downey

• Re: Tycho - vpnelson - December 3, 2000 - 16:14 UTC
  • Re: Re: Tycho - ecdowney - December 4, 2000 - 14:19 UTC