Running catcdsin

Unlike most other CURSA applications catcdsin is not an ADAM A-task (it is, in fact, a Perl script). Consequently, it handles parameters slightly differently to other applications. However, it never prompts for any parameters so the differences will not usually be important to you.

Suppose that you had the text version of a CDS catalogue and its corresponding ReadMe file in your current directory. You would simply type:

catcdsin

catcdsin generates the corresponding STL description, displays the name of the STL description file it has created and terminates. There are various options which can be specified. By default catcdsin copies the ReadMe file to the description file as textual comments. This behaviour can be suppressed by typing:

catcdsin  text=none

(This option is analogous to the usual mechanism for controlling the amount of textual information copied, which is described in Section .) The equinox and epoch of the celestial coordinates cannot be reliably determined automatically from the ReadMe file. You will need to read the ReadMe file yourself and decide what they are. They can then be specified by typing, for example:

catcdsin  equinox=J2000  epoch=J1995.3

Obviously, you substitute values appropriate to your catalogue. The equinox and epoch should have their usual CURSA syntax (see Section ). Either, neither or both can be specified. If you wish to suppress the automatic interpretation of celestial coordinates, and instead have the sexagesimal subdivisions of angles treated as separate columns, type:

catcdsin  angles=no

The input CDS description file does not have to be called ReadMe. For example, a file called cdsdesc.lis could be processed by typing:

catcdsin  infile=cdsdesc.lis

These various options can be combined. For example, to process a file called cdsdesc.lis, specifying the equinox as J2000 and not copying the CDS file as textual information type:

catcdsin  infile=cdsdesc.lis  equinox=J2000  text=none

CDS ReadMe files can (and often do) contain descriptions of more than one catalogue or table. Usually these catalogues or tables will be closely related; perhaps a main catalogue and a table of notes. catcdsin creates a separate STL description file for every catalogue found in the ReadMe file.

A few CDS catalogues do not contain celestial coordinates; spectral line wavelength lists are the obvious example. Occasionally the coordinates may be in a non-standard format which catcdsin does not interpret properly. In this case it may be possible to fix-up the STL description file generated by catcdsin by hand. See Appendices  and for details of the STL format. Such occurrences seem to be rare.