United States Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station
Description:
USNO-B is an all-sky catalog that presents positions, proper motions, magnitudes in various optical passbands, and star/galaxy estimators for 1,042,618,261 objects derived from 3,643,201,733 separate observations. The data were obtained from scans of 7435 Schmidt plates taken for the various sky surveys during the last 50 years. USNO-B1.0 is believed to provide all-sky coverage, completeness down to V=21, 0.2" astrometric accuracy at J2000, 0.3 mag photometric accuracy in up to five colors, and 85% accuracy for distinguishing stars from nonstellar objects. A brief discussion of various issues is given here, but the actual data are available from the US Naval Observatory Web site and others.
The ephemeris were produced by simulating the ejection of meteoroids
from the sunlit hemisphere of cometary nuclei, typically from 0 to 3
au, followed by the propagation of orbits of meteoroids in the Solar
System, taking into account the gravity of the Sun, the 8 planets,
Pluto, and the Moon, as well as the radiation pressure and the
Poynting-Robertson drag. Note that asteroid parent bodies were
considered as active (i.e. comet-like bodies) even if they are not
active today. The showers are predicted when a planet enters a large
enough set of meteoroids, at a distance less than typically 0.01 au.
See Vaubaillon J., Colas F., Jorda L. 2005 A new method to predict
meteor showers. I. Description of the model, Astronomy and
Astrophysics, Volume 439/2 p.751-760, as well as: Vaubaillon J. 2017 A
confidence index for forecasting of meteor showers, Planetary and
Space Science, Volume 143 p.78-82
The WISE Preliminary Release includes data from the first 105 days of WISE survey observations, 14 January 2010 to 29 April 2010, that were processed with initial calibrations and reduction algorithms. Primary release data products include an Atlas of 10,464 calibrated, coadded Image Sets, a Source Catalog containing positional and photometric information for over 257 million objects detected on the WISE images, and an Explanatory Supplement that provides a user's guide to the WISE mission and format, content, characteristics and cautionary notes for the Release products. Ancillary release products include an archive of over 754,000 Single-exposure Image sets and database of over 2.2 billion source extractions from those images, and moving object tracklets identified as part of the NEOWISE program (Mainzer et al. 2011).