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J. E. Morrison, B. McLean (Space Telescope Science Institute), GSC-II Catalog Construction Team
The Catalogs and Surveys Branch of the Space Telescope Science Institute has the goal of providing products and tools to increase the efficiency of telescope operations, observation planning and statistical astronomical research. The digitization of the second-epoch all-sky photographic surveys is approaching completion and being made available to the community.
In addition to providing the images, STScI is leading a consortium to create a second version of the Guide Star Catalog (GSC-II), which will be used for both ground and space-based telescope operations. This all-sky catalog will contain an estimated 2 billion objects and will be complete to a magnitude of at least J=18 and as faint as J=21 at high galactic latitudes. Using the observations in different bandpasses at different epochs allows the computation of both colors and proper motions. These data are being loaded into an object-oriented database, which is designed to allow easy recalibration of the data as better algorithms and data models are developed.
The first public release of the catalog with observations in the J (blue) and F (red) will take place in 2001 and we describe the construction and properties of the dataset. A final release will take place one year later with improved calibrations and the addition of observations from the IV-N (optical-IR) plates.