• FREEWARE : CatAstroFE is an application I wrote to be useful to the whole amateur astronomers' community. Because of this, no fee is due for using CatAstroFE: if you like it, you can simply send me a postcard of the place you live in, so I can know how far it has managed to spread.
If you have any remarks or bug reports, you can write me or send e-mail to the following address:
Francesco Meschia
Via Baroncini, 4
14100 Asti
ITALY
internet: fmeschia@freenet.hut.fi
• DISCLAIMER : as an independent software developer, I can make no warranties whatsoever on CatAstroFE itself or on its fitness to your particular needs. It should make no damage to your system, but if you manage to blow up your Mac using it, that's your business only! Sorry...
• VERSION HISTORY
1.0 First public release
Previous releases were development experiments only.
• WHAT IS CATASTROFE?
CatAstroFE is an electronic astronomical position catalogue, a star atlas and a chart generator. It is based on the SAO star catalogue, ranging up to magnitude 10.0. Over 240,000 stars are included in the catalogue, from declination -50° to +90°: due to this large number and to the need to reduce download time, only positions (referred to equinox 1950.0) and magnitudes made it to the "squeezed" catalogue. In other words, I was forced to strip proper motion data, spectra and color indexes from tha original catalogue. If you find this innaceptable, I cannot but be sorry. But just think that, If I had decided to include star spectra too, the size of the whole package would have increased by more than 25%!
• HOW TO USE CATASTROFE
When you open the application, CatAstroFE will display a window containing positions and magnitudes of all the stars in its catalogue, sorted by right ascension. This won't probably be much useful: it would be nicer to constrain search limits to a smaller portion of the sky. If you select "Find Zone..." from the Catalogue menu, you will be allowed to do so, picking the zone you like from a sky map, or entering the coordinates of its center with your keyboard. You can also select how wide your zone will be, from 30 arc minutes to 10 degrees (600 arc mins).
After you click on the "Ok" button, CatAstroFE will find and display data for the stars contained in the zone you selected. Now you can scroll through the list to find the data you need, or you can turn that meaningless sequence of numbers into a picture of the sky, selecting "Show as Chart" from the Catalogue menu. CatAstroFE will plot stars in a cylindrical conformal projection, so the North Pole and its neighborhood will be distorted from the real appearance of the sky: this could sound as a severe limitations, but turns itself to be useful when you use CatAstroFE for astrometrical purposes. Let's suppose you want to calculate the position of an object: since R.A. and dec. grid lines are always orthogonal and equally spaced (1.5 degrees per inch on printed maps), you can easily find the coordinates of the object from its offset from a known stars, using a ruler and a calculator.
The limiting magnitude for charts can be adjusted using the commands in the Catalogue menu, or their keyboard shortcuts Command-minus and Command-plus. This will increase or decrease limiting magnitude by 0.1 mag, but if you hold the shift key while invoking these commands, limiting magnitude will be changed in steps of one magnitude.
I hope CatAstroFE may help you in some way. If you like it, please let me know: perhaps, in the future, I will precess position to 2000.0, or add some other data and projections. By now, have fun and clear skies!
