Celestia Forums

i read in the readme that stars.dat came from the Hipparcos catalog.
does some one have the software that converted the data

in specific i am looking to add specific stars from the catalog of the open cluster m44

You can manually update the dat file fairly easily...read the adding stars thread...

What I would like is a comprehensive catalog of the stars plotted at galactic center...

after hiting the float wall head on i found (using vb5 pro) "Put"ing a "single"(float) data type to a "Binary" file

here is the vb code


Using WinHex('s) (a hex editor) (http://www.winhex.com/)
data interpeter the 13.31 came out as 1.331e+1 or C3 F5 54 41


p.s. try NASA's Astronomica Data Center for many many catalogs (http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/)

Const h! = 13.31
'-------------------------
Private Sub Form_Load()
Open "c:\float.dat" For Binary Access Write As 1
Put #1, 1, h!
End Sub



Don't you mean
Open "c:\float.dat" For Binary Access Write As #1

And what does h! mean? I've never come across that before.

You can use CStarsConv to export stars.dat to XML tweak it add stars, whatever, and then import it back again. Click here for download information.

In VB you can use characters like !, &, $, and % to quickly specify the data type of a variable. So for example, instead of saying



you could just say



Similarly, & means Long, $ means String, and % means integer. This is a "feature" that has leaked in all the way from QBasic.
And you can indeed omit the # sign when specifying the file number.

You learn something every day. I was always under the impression that to omit the # you had the make the file a "FreeFile". But then again I never tried it a different way.

I remember those functions in the QBasic days, although I only knew the $ one, not the other ones.

I would recommend Perl for this kind of work. Vb has some seriously messed up syntax.