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United States Naval Observatory B1.0 Catalog

Metadata Updated: April 10, 2026

This all-sky catalog, described in Monet et al. (2003), consists of positions, proper motions, magnitudes, and other measured quantities for 1,045,175,762 objects. The data were derived from digitizing scans of almost 7,500 photographic plates taken from various sky surveys during the interval from 1949 to 2002. The originating plate material includes five complete coverages of the northern sky and four of the southern sky.\n\nTo be included in the catalog, an object must have been detected on two different surveys because isolated, single-survey detections are unreliable. For the earlier USNO-A catalog (which was essentially a two-color, one-epoch catalog), this meant that the object must have had detectable fluxes on both the red and blue plates, and this led to the exclusion of many faint objects with non-neutral colors. Also, the larger epoch difference in the southern survey coverage meant that objects with larger proper motions tended to be excluded. USNO-B1.0 attempts to fix both of these problems. An object detected in the same band at two epochs will be included in USNO-B1.0, as will objects that have significant proper motions, although it is still the case that objects with large motions and extreme colors may be omitted. The selection algorithm requires that spatially coincident detections must be made on any two of the surveys for an object to be classified as real and be included in the catalog.\n\nThe catalog is expected to be complete down to V=21. Estimated positional accuracies are 0.2 arcsec, photographic magnitude accuracies are 0.3 mag, and the accuracy for distinguishing stars from non-stellar objects is 85%.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: See this page for license information.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date April 10, 2026
Publisher NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive
Maintainer
Identifier ivo://irsa.ipac/usno/catalog/usno-b1
Data Last Modified 2026-04-06
Category Astrophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 0e8df019-9e4a-402d-b6b4-5f22cdba3fa9
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL ivo://irsa.ipac/usno/catalog/usno-b1
License https://www.usa.gov/government-works
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash e68725e4d7848e260a08e0f9de8fc367998260627e51cbf1e69078a9c3b15afc
Source Schema Version 1.1

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