Purpose: This code gives the user more information about available PCRS peakup catalog stars. It is intended to be used in conjunction with Spot where the catalog stars must be chosen for observations. The catalog itself is included in the tar file.

Author: Jessica Krick
Date Contributed: 22 Jan 2015
System Requirements: IDL

Information and Download

Download pick_pcrs_catalog_v4.tar (18 MB)

The IRAC instrument support team recommends avoiding stars with large position errors. Position errors in the output are calculated with an epoch of 2009.5, so are actually larger for the current epoch. Brighter stars are more desirable because then the peakup integration time will be shorter, although all brightnesses are feasible. Only catalog stars with angular distances less than ~half a degree are shown as viable catalog stars. The best star to choose is some combination of position error, V_mag and angular distance. If this tool shows a star which is not listed in Spot, and it is your choice for the best catalog star, you can always enter it manually as a PCRS peakup star. The catalog used here is exactly the same as that used in Spot.