Catalogue formats

The native format in which GAIA reads and writes the catalogues and tables which it plots as image overlays is the so-called Tab-Separated Table (TST) format, which is described in SSN/75[6]. GAIA can also read and write catalogues in the FITS tables, STL and ASCII_HEAD formats. GAIA differentiates between these different formats by using the file-type at the end of the file-name. Brief notes on the individual formats and their required file-types follow.

FITS tables

a variant of the FITS format for storing catalogues and tables. Accepted file types: .FIT .fit .FITS .fits .GSC .gsc

STL

the Small Text List format used by CURSA (see SUN/190[5]). Accepted file types: .TXT .txt

ASCII_HEAD

the `ASCII Header' format used by the EXTRACTOR package (see SUN/226[3]). Accepted file types: .asc .ASC .lis .LIS

Mixed capitalisations, such as `.Fits' are also recognised. GAIA interprets all other file formats as indicating TST format catalogues (but note that CURSA requires TST format catalogues to have a file-type of .TAB or .tab).