GCVS latest information now in VSX

Hi all,

this weekend we finished updating VSX with the latest GCVS information.
Over these years the GCVS Team was improving the positions of thousands of their catalogued stars and adding new official designations through their Name Lists. But adding information on lots of their stars had been a pending issue.
On November 2019 a new version (5.1) with periods and epochs for lots of stars that had that information missing was released.
Now all that data have been included in VSX. We have taken care of not correcting information that had already been updated in VSX but if you find any mistake, please let us know.

In this process we have found that nearly 500 stars had coordinate offsets larger than 3" between the GCVS and VSX. This meant wrong identifications in 90% of the cases. We individually checked each case to confirm or change the current ID. Our identification was correct in approximately 60% of the cases.
3,000 stars had positional offsets between 0.4 and 3". Those were given new Gaia DR2 positions.

In total, more than 11,000 stars were revised.
This will help to identify GCVS stars that are actually missing information without having to check the GCVS site.

We still need to finish updating the NSV catalogue.
And we are also going to make an update of all the VSX stars missing information that have been observed by the ASAS-SN survey and given classifications and elements.

The VSX update process is neverending. We have hundreds of thousands of new variables to add coming from the ATLAS, ZTF and Gaia surveys/missions.
Stay tuned for more news!

Sebastian and the VSX Team.