The USNO ACT Catalog and Future Contributions to the Optical Reference Frame

Statistics – Applications

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In 1997, the United States Naval Observatory released the ACT Reference Catalog. This is a combination of the Astrographic Catalogue (AC 2000) and the Tycho catalog designed to improve the proper motions of most of the million stars in Tycho. With positional errors at 1991.25 of about 25 mas and proper motion errors of roughly 3 mas/year the ACT will continue to be valuable for a number of years. However, new projects are underway that, within a few years, will supersede the ACT in both accuracy and density. In order to improve the AC 2000, a new reference catalog is being compiled using the Hipparcos catalog to transform older transit circle and photographic catalogs directly to the ICRS. These will be combined with Hipparcos and Tycho to create the best possible catalog for reductions of the Astrographic Catalogue and Carte du Ciel data. This work will have other applications: 1) A new version of ACT that incorporates not only the improved AC 2000 but also the numerous other catalogs just mentioned; 2) An attempt to improve individual Hipparcos proper motions, especially those with errors > 1.5 mas/year; 3) Transformation of the observations of Solar System objects made during the past 100 years to the new reference frame. New observations are currently being made at CTIO using the USNO CCD Astrograph. This program is designed to observe all stars in the southern hemisphere from 7th to 16th magnitudes with precisions in the 20-50 mas range, including a direct link to the ICRF through optical counterparts. Observations commenced on January 25th of this year. A status report and a summary of the first results will be given.

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