REVISION HISTORY for SAC DATABASE The goal of the people working on the Saguaro Astronomy Club database has been to provide a listing which could yield an observing list for use at the telescope. The early versions covered plenty of objects for users of scopes up to 8" in size. As we added more objects and data, the list became more massive and we believe that it now covers a large portion of what could be seen in a telescope in the 10" to 14" range. Addition of many more objects will add many small and faint galaxies, seeing as that is about all that remains below 14 magnitude. We do not relish this task and have no plans to undertake such a large work. Version 1.0 consisted of 1100 objects down to a magnitude limit of about 11.5. It was also the beginning of the multiple star file. Version 2.0 started to add a variety of objects from the RNGC. We soon discovered an excellent list of corrections from Brian Skiff and Dr. Harold Corwin. Version 3.0 should not be used. It is easy to spot the erroneous data. Look at M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, if its' declination is -31, that is the bad version!! We certainly learned a lot about maintaining back ups to data. Version 4.0 combined data from version 2.0 with the data input by Jeff Weintraub from Sky Catalog 2000. This version contains much good info and started to show us how massive a fairly complete deep sky database was going to get. This was the first version to contain Dan Ward's Report Generator. This version was compressed with PKPAK 3.61. After the release of version 4.0 many SAC members joined together in a combined effort to try and find as much info as we could on objects each person was assigned. The listing of who-did-what is in SACDOC.TXT. Several intermediate versions were compiled within the club, and then: Version 5.0 fixed some problems with the DESCR field and included all the NOTES which members had found. With the inclusion of multistr, navstar, potporri and Jim Lucyk's photondx files, this was the best version to date. A medium to large telescope owner with good skies can keep busy with version 5 for many observing sessions. A.J. Crayon's install program will put this version onto hard disk. The files are no larger than 360K each, to accommodate BBS operators. SAC Report Generator has been rewritten to include several more features. This version was compressed with the old compression algorithm so that we would only have to include ARCE on disk to un-arc the files. Version 5.1 fixed a small problem with the Report Generator. It can now search for objects with lower case characters in the name, such as Cr or Tr. If you are using your own database manager or if you do not use SACREP to search for individual objects, the update is unnecessary. Version 5.2 added several corrections, given in the file "errata50.txt". Dan Ward updated the Report Generator. Several internal versions existed within the SAC as we updated the information and Dan Ward set up Report Generator to accommodate the changes. We dropped the SOURCE field, finding that we where doing a poor job of keeping track of where each objects info source. We added the SUBR field with info from RC3 on surface brightness. Sizes of several fields changed as the NOTES and NGC DESCR fields got larger. U2 and TIR fields got smaller because we found that we did not need to provide multiple chart numbers for each object. Version 6.0 contains all the changes mentioned above and accompanying changes made to Report Generator. Version 6.1 incorporates several changes which I believe are well worth doing. First, the database is in one large file and not small pieces, RA hour size. Second, nothing is compressed by the pkzip program, it all fits on one 1.44 Meg floppy. Third, the errors given below have been fixed in the data, I will maintain a complete errata list if you wish to add to it, please contact me. Version 6.2 takes care of a few errors, and make the data more consistent, such as finding a magnitude that was given as 08 and changing that to 08.0, so that all the data appears the same to the computer. Version 7.0 is an outgrowth of the NGC project (www.ngcic.org) to update the NGC and make certain that all the objects are identified with the correct object in the sky. The fruit of this undertaking is in Version 7.0. Dr. Harold Corwin and Wolfgang Steinicke have provided info on many NGC objects and have solved many puzzles concerning the NGC. The number of truly unknown or unverified objects has shrunk to a fraction of where we began and this version of the SAC database reflects that work. Version 7.1 quickly followed 7.0 to fix several small, but insidious, errors. Four objects had quote marks within the text and that created problems with importing the data into a spreadsheet. There was no "surface brightness" for about 50 objects. And, NGC 2736 is a bright nebula, not a galaxy. So, an afternoon spent repairing these problems makes version 7.1 as good as the SAC database as ever been, enjoy. Version 7.2 also fixes a few errors, some of the NGC description fields have capital "RI" which should be "Ri" for "Rich" cluster. Also, a few places have a double comma with no quote between, this confuses some database manager programs. A few spelling errors and typos in the Notes were also fixed. Versions 7.3 and 7.4 are internal to the SAC group working on the database. They include changes in the data and additions to the brightnesses of central stars of planetary nebulae and open cluster data. A few objects were both added and deleted. Version 7.5 is a release that taught me quite a bit about using Excel as a database manager. It seemed to me that if you insert a group of three objects, that Excel would create three rows for the program so that the insert operation would not overwrite prefectly good data. Not So! In short, don't use version 7.5. Version 7.7 is the latest release. A big thank you to Auke Slotgraaf for help in double checking. Version 8.0 gave us an opportunity to deal with the Barnard Dark Nebulae. The data we used in the past had grouped several of these nebulae all together on one line and that is difficult for a computer search routine to utilize. So, this version has each Barnard number given its own record. All the 'B' numbers are not provided, mostly because they are not very distinct. This version also fixed a few remaining errors, mostly in the NOTES area. Version 8.1 provided a chance to take on a variety of small errata that had been missed over the years. Stephen Schrimpf and I combed through the data and looked for some small and persistent errata. NOTE: from April 2010 forward we will update a text file on the SAC website which will contain any problems to be fixed. I have no doubt that there are a few, but we have done a fine job up to now keeping the data as free from errors as we can. From now on, users can update their own copy of the data.