Where are the HEASARC Catalogs?

    The area heasarc/dbase/dump contains dumps of all the browsable catalogs
    and datasets that the HEASARC has on-line, in the form of gzipped
    ASCII files. Thus, if a user wants the entire SAO catalog:

       cd heasarc/dbase/dump
       dir heasarc_sao*
       binary
       get heasarc_sao.dat.gz

    The user will have to use the gunzip utility on this file on his/her own
    machine to turn the gzipped (binary) file into an ASCII file. If the user
    does not have access to gzip/gunzip, then they should type:

       cd heasarc/dbase/dump
       dir heasarc_sao*
       get heasarc_sao.dat

    and ftp will gunzip the file `on the fly', i.e., restore to ascii form
    and then send it to you. The disadvantage of this, of course, is that
    the file transfer will be slower because of the larger file size.

    The format in which a catalog (say called catname) has been dumped is
    contained in a file in the directory heasarc/dbase/pr_files that is
    called catname_par.dat.Z (i.e., in Unix-compressed format). Thus to obtain
    the format for the SAO Catalog:

        cd heasarc/dbase/pr_files
        dir sao*
        get sao_par.dat

    and ftp will uncompress the file and then send it to you.

    These catalog files can be very big (sao.dat.gz is 14.4 Mbytes, for example,
    and gunzipped will be even bigger) so always check the size of a catalog
    using the dir command before getting! Also, there will generally
    be a time lag of several days between the creation or revision of a
    database and its appearance in this dump sub-directory; typically, we
    create these database dump files once a week.