VSS Chart Catalogue V15.0 (2017)

[Dr Paul Leyland]

The VSS makes available a PDF file which contains names, co-ordinates. magnitudes, and lots of other useful information. I printed off a copy some years ago.

Now PDF is a fine way to read on a screen or off pieces of chewed trees but it has some serious shortcomings. It is not easy to sort or read programmatically for instance. Some kind soul, and to my shame I forget precisely who, provided me with a spreadsheet from which the PDF is generated.

At long last I have munged the data into a format more suitable to my purposes. For instance. the tables are first sorted by Dec and then split into two portions. The North half is everything with a Dec greater than my latitude. Then each portion is sorted by RA. These processes, of course, destroy the sorting by constellation which the PDF contains. For me it has the great advantage in that I can schedule observations in the order in which they pass the meridian or sink into the west. It also tells me at a glance (the north/south divide) whether the dome is likely to slew by 180 degrees when moving from one star to another which is fairly close by in the sky.

I could easily make custom ordered lists for any latitude if anyone else thinks they may be useful.

However, I would ask that the spreadsheet be made available alongside the PDF so that anyone else can mine the data in any way they wish. A CSV or TSV file is very easy to access programmatically.

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