VI/31 Plate Centers, Epochs Lick/Mt. John Sky Survey (Lick Obs. 1965)
Plate Centers and Epochs of the Lick Observatory/Mount John Observatory
Sky Survey
Lick Observatory
<Lick Observatory (1965)>
ADC_Keywords: Surveys - 975; Plate data - 650
Description:
The "Lick Observatory Sky Atlas" (Lick Observatory, 1965) is a set
of plates for 166 fields of 18 by 18 degrees, covering the sky from
the north pole down to -30 degrees of declination. "The Mount John
University Observatory Photographic Sky Survey" (Doughty et al.,
1972) covers 142 similar fields from -15 degrees of declination down
to the south pole. In the region of overlap, the fields are the
same for the two surveys. Fields 1-46 of the Mount John survey
cover the part of the sky (-45 degrees of declination to the south
pole) not in the Lick survey; in a special limited edition published
in 1972, this part is called the "Canterbury Sky Atlas" (Australia).
The overlap between fields is 3 degrees. The plate scale is
approximately 232 arc seconds per millimeter. The limiting magnitude
is approximately 16. Neither survey is intended for astrometry or
photometry; the Lick survey was originally done to obtain galaxy
statistics (Shane and Wirtanen 1967). An excellent summary of
several photographic sky surveys is given by Ingrao and Kasparian
(1967). T. A. Nagy (1980) generated the dataset described, and also
gathered most of the material used in the writing of this document.
File Summary:
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FileName Lrecl Records Explanations
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ReadMe 80 . This file
data.dat 80 212 Data
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Byte-by-byte Description of file: data.dat
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Bytes Format Units Label Explanations
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8-10 I3 --- Fnum *? Field number
14-16 I3 --- Fnum2 Field number 2
18-21 I4 --- CSInum ? The number of CSI stars in the field
24-33 F10.8 rad RArad Right ascension of the field center,
equinox 1950, in radians.
37-47 F11.8 rad DErad Declination of the field center,
equinox 1950, in radians.
53-61 F9.4 yr Epoch *Epoch of the plate
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Note on Fnum:
There are 212 fields, and one record in this file for each field. The south
pole is number 1, and the north pole is number 212. The other fields are
arranged in fifteen-degree declination bands; within each band, the fields
are numbered with increasing right ascension. The records in this file are
in ascending order of field number.
Note on Epoch:
Epoch of the plate, given as a year with a decimal fraction. This fraction
is the length of time from January 0.0 UT to the exposure date, given as a
fraction of the tropical year of 365.2422 mean solar days. For fields in
common between the two surveys (nos. 47-142), the Mount John epoch is
used.
References:
Doughty, N. A., Shane, C. D., and Wood, F. B. 1972, The Mount John University
Photographic Sky Survey and the Canterbury Sky Atlas (Australia)
(Christchurch, New Zealand: University of Canterbury).
Ingrao, H. C., and Kasparian, E. 1967, Sky and Telescope (November), p. 284.
Lick Observatory Sky Atlas, 1965 (Mount Hamilton, California: Lick Observatory)
Nagy, T. A. 1980, Astron. Data Center Bull. 1, 28.
Shane, C. D. 1958, Publ. Astron. Pacific 70, 609.
Shane, C. D., and Wirtanen, C. A. 1967, The Distribution of Galaxies
(Lick Obs. Publications, XXII Part I).
(End) C.-H. Joseph Lyu [Hughes STX/NASA] 16-Aug-1995