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The CATalog Server, or CAT, is designed to help the user operator select a star in a certain region of the sky for sending to the TCS as a guide, WFS, or Science target. Given a Right Ascension and /Declination or Azimuth/Elevation input from the user, it will display all the stars in a certain radius from the given point in a visual and a tabular format.. It is important to remember that the search is based on RA-DEC and not AZ-EL and the conversion from AZ-EL to RA-DEC has some uncertainties. CAT does an approximate conversion which is good enough for the search purposes.

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The above image is the default layout for CAT. It is separated into five components: The User's view, the observer target view, the Image view, the Table view, and the Science Target view. Each of the views can be minimized or maximized within the current window; they can also be deleted or separated from the perspective as well as be moved around at the user's discretion. The control for each view is located at the top of the view. And to move or separate, the user only needs to click and drag it to the desired location.

• User View - where the input for the search is entered
• Target View - displays the information on the selected target and allows sending to the TCS
• Image View - displays the field of view and the objects within
• Table view - a tabular display of the objects which allows sorting
• Science Target View - displays the info on the current science target accepted by the TCS

There are currently three catalogs in the database:

• Bright Star Catalog
• Tycho
• UCAC4

More details on CAT can be found in the following pages: