[vsnet-id 737] Re: (fwd) Re: [AAVSO-DIS] WW HYA

[Taichi Kato <tkato@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp>]

Re: (fwd) Re: [AAVSO-DIS] WW HYA

>      I am indeed being somewhat prescriptive, mainly by way of reducing
> confusion on lists and in the literature.  While it is true that all names
> are valid, I disagree that there are not preferred names.  And I would
> suggest a rough and somewhat flexible hierarchy for those names.  Thus one
> does not refer to a naked-eye star by its USNO-x.x name, but instead by
> its Greek-letter assignment.

   Naturally.  We don't want to receive observations of WW Hya with an
alias name of GSC 4869.534 or something like that.  But this is not the
main point of this discussion.  My point is the way to unambiguously
refer to *catalog identifications* (not to the object itself), which can
be particularly important when there is any doubt in the large-scale
identification, as in the present case.

> One can, for instance, find both the IRAS point-source and faint-source
> names for WW Hya in VizieR, but only the 'main' point-source name appears
> in SIMBAD (which is my reason for suggesting the faint-source ID is not
> really necessary, since the compilers have indeed made an implicit
> recommendation here).  If there were only a faint-source name, then of course
> it would be reasonable to adopt it.  Since either tells you mainly that
> there's a 12-micron source in this location, just one of the names is
> sufficient.

   In some cases, different designations are given for the same object
in IRAS PSC and IRAS FSC (or IRAS SSC).  In such cases, the IRAS names
are not unique.  In the present WW Hya case, this is not fortunately
the case.  Alternatively, my list provides (not always self-evident)
information that the source is given the same designation in all of
the IRAS source catalogs.  For example, a famous Mira star T Aqr has
different IRAS designations betwwen IRAS PSC and IRAS FSC (and many other
examples exist).

Regards,
Taichi Kato

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