APASS DR10 catalog lookup fails

Hi all,

I’m using Phoranso for photometric reduction and have run into a recurring but inconsistent issue with the catalog lookup.
When running “Load Catalog,” the APASS DR10 query sometimes fails to return data for my field,
and when Phoranso falls back to my local UCAC4 copy, that occasionally fails too — leaving me with no reference stars found in the FoV at all.

I tested the underlying AAVSO endpoint directly:

https://www.aavso.org/cgi-bin/apass_dr10_download.pl?ra=<RA>&dec=<DEC>&radius=<RADIUS>&outtype=<TYPE>

It worked fine twice this morning — but the failures I’ve seen in Phoranso don’t correlate with a fixed field or time of day;
it seems to depend on which FoV/coordinates are being queried. Quite puzzling, since it’s not a simple “always down” or “always up” situation.

I’ve reached out to Tonny directly, but wanted to ask here as well:

  • Has anyone else experienced this field-dependent behavior — DR10 lookups working for some FoVs/coordinates but not others?
  • Does anyone know whether specific fields, star densities, or coordinate ranges are more prone to failing on the AAVSO side?

Any shared experience would be much appreciated!

Clear skies,
Dieter

Does APASS cover your favorite FOV?

Ray

Another suggstion is to use APASS DR9 from the CDS VizieR catalogue-query service. It is item II/336. Bear in mind also the caveat in the Web page description of DR10: “The photometric errors appear to be worse in DR10 than in DR9.” Seems like one should prefer using DR9 in any case.

\Brian

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