Thanks for your interest in USNO-A2.0.  I am sorry to say that we have
no more copies of the catalog.  We could afford to print only 500 copies,
and these have been distributed to the community.  Since we are making
progress on compiling the USNO-B catalog, we will not be making any
more copies of USNO-A.

All I can do is suggest the following options.

   A) The entire catalog resides on ftp.nofs.navy.mil (192.68.148.67).
         login: anonymous
         password:    (your e-mail address)
         cd pub/usnoa

      We strongly recommend that you NOT do "mget *".  Some implementations
      of this command spawn a large number of jobs and attempt to get all
      files at the same time.  This plugs our system so badly that we must
      reboot the machine.  Also, most folks do not have the bandwidth to
      receive 6.6 GBytes of data in a reasonable time, and we only have T1
      service on our end.  FTP requests that take many days often end in
      failure.

      We suggest that you get the zone of the catalog that you need.  This
      is kindest to us and to your colleagues who are also trying to get
      copies of the catalog.

   B) Our Web site (http://www.nofs.navy.mil and then click on
      "Data & Software") serves pixel data, finding charts, and portions
      of the catalog.  To the extent possible given our budget and resources,
      we can support requests for any and all of these products on a field
      by field basis.  As you will discover, large requests take
      substantially longer to fill than shorter ones.

   C) Due to printing overruns, we have a few extra copies of individual
      CD-ROMs.  From the FTP site, get the file toc.a which contains the
      list of which zone is on which CD-ROM.  I will satisfy requests for
      specific CD-ROMs until we run out.

   D) The Hansen Planitarium is making CD-R copies of the catalog available
      for a nominal cost.  The point of contact is tonykoro@coastlink.com
      for details.  USNO cannot officially endorse this activity, but we
      know of no problems with these copies.  Others have permission to
      make such copies as well, but I do not have their e-mail addresses.

We anticipated the need for a deep, dense catalog to support minor planet
observers using CCDs and smaller aperture telescopes.  I worked with Ted
Bowell (Lowell) to prepare the USNO-SA2.0 catalog.  This catalog was
designed to have enough reference stars so that astrometric solutions
could be done using a few stars in each field.  Excepting in the Milky Way
or other areas of high star density, this catalog appears to be adequate.
We are sorry that it does not contain all the stars in the field, but
an astrometric solution based on a few stars will be just as accurate
as one based on all stars.  The SA catalog is still available, and can be
requested from a form on our Web site.

Please understand that USNO-A is the first extremely large star catalog,
and we are learning (the hard way) about the difficulties of distributing
such a large amount of data.  We filled all reasonable requests until we
ran out of money, and I do not regret this policy.  USNO will try to have
a better policy for future releases of USNO-A and USNO-B, but there are
still very few media for distribution of large data sets that are cheap and
widely supported.  If you have specific suggestions about how to solve this
fundamental problem, please let me know.  All we can promise is to do better
next time.  I have saved your request, and should the situation change,
I will try to satisfy it.  Unfortunately, I cannot send you the entire
catalog at this time.

-Dave
	(Dave Monet is dgm@nofs.navy.mil)
        July 20, 2001