                             Data files README
                                    or
                  What is all the stuff in this directory?
                  ----------------------------------------
                        Miguel Coca <mcoca@gnu.org>


As of version 0.9.5, GNU SpaceChart has moved away from the Gliese catalogue
as the source of the default data file. The data file included along with
GNU Spacechart is hip30.dat, and it's mostly a subset of the Hipparcos main
catalogue, restricted to stars within 30 parsecs of the Sun. Information
about multiple stars not included in the Hipparcos data was obtained from
the CCDM catalogue.

The default distance of 30 parsecs was chosen to avoid a huge increase in
the size of the tarball. However, it's very easy to get larger data files,
and I'll try to make some available from the web page.

If you want to build your own data files, you'll need the original catalogue
files, which you can download from CDS (http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/). To be
precise, the files you need are:

	* The Hipparcos main catalogue:

		- ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/I/239/hip_main.dat.gz

	* The CCDM catalogue:

		- ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/I/269A/ccdm.dat.gz

Save both files into this directory, and gunzip them. Then, run the
hip2spacechart.sh shell script like this:

	$ ./hip2spacechart.sh 30

Where that "30" is the radius of the data file in parsecs from the Sun.
