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Skysafari 6 Pro | Non-Existent Stars Shown; i.e. OCC XXXX Occult. Doubles Cat. (These Are WDS Infrared Stars)

Last night observing with my small telescope observe that SkySafari 6 Pro shows stars that do not exist in reality. He shows them as OCC XXXX (Occult. Doubles Cat. XXXX), in SkySafari 5 Pro they do not appear.

 

Attached capture of the same area of SS6PRO and SS5PRO

 

7 comments

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    Bill Tschumy

    Why do you say the stars don't exist?  These seem to be stars from the Washington Double Star catalog (and also other catalogs).  SkySafari 6 has a different database than SS5 so it is not totally surprising that the OCC designation might be somewhat different in the two apps.  It looks like OCC is the discoverer code for these stars in the WDS catalog.

     

     

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    Antonio Vilchez

    In this case, those three stars shown are magnitude 5 and were not visible, I was visualizing in the eyepiece stars of magnitude 9.8 and those 3 did not appear in the field. It has happened to me in several zones with this type of stars and none was visible surpassing several weaker magnitudes.

    Could it be that they appear in the wrong area?

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    Antonio Vilchez

    The view in the eyepiece was identical to that shown in the capture of SS5

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    Bill Tschumy

    I will ask our database guy to look into this.

     

     

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    Bill Tschumy

    We have investigated this a bit.  These appear to be errors in the WDS (Washington Double Star) itself.  We have found a number of stars that have magnitudes brighter than 10-11 magnitude that only appear in the WDS and don't have corresponding entries in the Hipparcos and Tycho catalog.  We are emailing the WDS folks to ask what is going on.  If we look at a slightly older version of the WDS, these entries don't appear.  So as I say, it appears to be an error in the most recent WDS catalog we used when building our database.

    We will try to get this sorted out ASAP.

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    Bill Tschumy

    OK, we've heard back from WDS.  Apparently they have started adding infrared stars to the WDS.  They do designate the magnitude as an infrared magnitude, but we didn't know to filter those out.  So the stars are real, but the magnitude is not the visual magnitude.  We will rebuild the database and remove these.  Sorry.

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    Antonio Vilchez

    I am happy to read your answer, thank you very much for the prompt response and for this wonderful application.

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