Does anyone know where I can obtain a readable / csv / text copy of our very own Dorrit's BSC? Every version I have seen so far does not look like a standard .csv or fixed-width format file. Looking at it in Notepad just looks like ASCII chaos. Surely someone somewhere has converted it to a standard format (Excel, Access, MySQL etc)!
I am planning to write a PHP app which shows the user what the night sky looks like from other stars and so need a consistent set of data (doesn't have to be necessarily 2000 epoch. The version I used (inputting by hand!) was taken from Becvar but many of the fainter/southern stars have no parallax, essential for the algorithm.
Hi Michael,
The CDS VizieR distribution (V/50 Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (Hoffleit+, 1991)) and choosing " ; separated values" looks very well machine readable, no ?
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR
Clear Skies !
Roger