WCSTools

stmc
2MASS Point Source Catalog Search Program

WCSTools programs
stmc finds objects in the 2MASS Point Source Catalog within a specified region of the sky and lists their sky positions or lists specific entries in that catalog. It is a symbolic link to scat, and is equivalent to running scat -c tmc ....

By default, only the brightest 100 objects (or closest 100, if the -s p option is used) are returned. Use the -n option to increase this number.

Output is to standard out, unless the -w flag is set, in which case it goes to objectname.tmc or search.tmc. For the All-Sky Data Release, the 2MASS_id number is the 2MASS declination zone, starting with 0 at the South Pole and moving north 0.1 degree at a time, followed by the sequence number of the star within the RA-sorted zone catalog.

For the Second Incremental Data Release (IDR2) catalog, the 2MASS_id number is the 2MASS region number, which is not the RA in hours because some one-hour bands have multiple regions, followed by by the sequence number of the star within the region, to fill seven decimal places. The relationship between region number, catalog file, and RA is shown in this table.

Set the environment variable TMC_PATH to the directory containing the region files (or links to them). If the environment variable is not set, the default is to look in the directory defined by tmcapath, for the All-Sky release, and tmc2path, for IDR2, near the start of the file libwcs/tmcread.c.

To search the area covered by a FITS image with a world coordinate system in its heder, use imtmc.

Command Line Arguments

CGI Queries and Parameters

As of version 2.9.4, stmc can be used remotely as a CGI executable.

Examples

Search with results to standard output
Search with results to a file
Find closest star
Find stars by number
Match stars in input catalog

Last updated 12 January 2004 by Doug Mink dmink@cfa.harvard.edu

Telescope Data Center