The USNO-B Catalog

USNO-B is an all-sky catalog that presents positions, proper motions, magnitudes in various optical passbands, and star/galaxy estimators for 1,042,618,261 objects derived from 3,643,201,733 separate observations. The data were obtained from scans of 7435 Schmidt plates taken for the various sky surveys during the last 50 years. USNO-B1.0 is believed to provide all-sky coverage, completeness down to V = 21,02 astrometric accuracy at J2000, 0.3 mag photometric accuracy in up to five colors, and 85% accuracy for distinguishing stars from nonstellar objects. A brief discussion of various issues is given here, but the actual data are available from the US Naval Observatory Web site and others.
Published in the Astronomical Journal, v125 p984-993, Feb 2003. Prepared in cooperation with the Palomar Observatory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, AZ, the UK Schmidt Telescope, Anglo-Australian Observatory, NSW, Australia, and the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.