New, highly accurate positions and motions available for millions of stars

The United States Naval Observatory (USNO) has released a new catalog of over 107 million stars, the 5th USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC5). This catalog of about 5.5 gigabytes of binary data is currently available from the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) Data Center. It will soon be available from the Astronomical Data Center (CDS) in Strasbourg, France and its mirror sites. In addition to very precise positions, this catalog contains the most accurate “proper motions” ever measured for such a large number of stars. A paper by USNO scientists Norbert Zacharias, Charlie Finch, and Julien Frouard describing this research has been published in The Astronomical Journal.