John A. Borders c/o NSWSES ERA P.O. Box 43-111 Port Hueneme, CA 93043 June 20, 1981 Sig/M User Group Box 97 Iselin, NJ 08830 Dear Sirs: Enclosed are eight single density CP/M disks containing the Yale Catalog of Bright Stars, revision 3, a documentation file, a program showing how to access the data on any star, a program which performs a simple validation of the catalog, and a sample bad file. The catalog was obtained from Dr. Wayne Warren of the National Space Science Data Center. Dr. Warren says that while the catalog is in the public domain, he would prefer to be the medium of distribution. The reason for this is that the catalog is being constantly revised as better data becomes available and errors are discovered. As is noted in the documentation file, he expects an update affecting the magnitude and color data for about 10% of the stars to be distributed in late 1981. The National Space Science Data Center normally distributes the catalog on 9 track tapes, in either IBM (EBCDIC) or ASCII compatible formats; they are incapable of distributing the catalog on CP/M disks. I am supplying the catalog to you for distribution because I feel that there are a large number of amateur astronomers/hobby computerists who could make good use of the catalog, and have no access to 9 track drives. If they did have access to 9 track drives, I suspect that their requests for the catalog and updates would quickly take up all of Dr. Warren's time. This would make him virtually useless to the National Space Science Data Center. I could be wrong, but once Pandora's Box is opened, it is very difficult to close. I would appreciate it if you would annotate a copy of this letter as to whether you plan to distribute the disks, and send it to Dr. Warren so that he will be able to refer amateur astronomers/hobby computerists to you for useable data. Very Respectfully, John A. Borders cc: Dr. Wayne Warren National Space Science Data Center Code 601 Goddard Space Center Greenbelt, MD 20771 (editor note: These eight diskettes will be distributed as volumes 31 through 38 of the Sig/M User Group Library. We will make this media available for this data if the demand is warranted.)