A. Preite-Martinez and F. Ochsenbein
Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale, CP 67, 00044 Frascati, Italy
C.D.S., 11, rue de l'Université, 67000 Strasbourg, France
We present a compact version of the Guide Star Catalogue (GSC) that can be loaded on disk due to its reduced size (300Mb). The reduction of a factor of 4 in size is obtained coding the original catalogue on 96 bits only per record, without loss of integrity. In this paper we describe the encoding method, the structure of the resulting files, and the very efficient search tool applied to this compact version.
The compact GSC v1.1 was installed on the CDS Archive machine (name cdsarc, Internet number 130.79.128.5), a Sun Spark workstation dedicated to archives of astronomical catalogues. A client/server mechanism was also installed. The client program allowing a query from abroad computers is available for distribution.
Published in Handling & Archiving Data from Ground-based Telescopes, Eds. Albrecht, M. A. and Pasian, F., ESO Conference and Workshop Proceedings Nr. 50
M. Albrecht (malbrecht@eso.org)