United States Naval Observatory B1.0 Catalog

The data were derived from digitizing scans of almost 7,500 photographic plates taken from various sky surveys during the interval from 1949 to 2002. The originating plate material includes five complete coverages of the northern sky and four of the southern sky.

To be included in the catalog, an object must have been detected on two different surveys because isolated, single-survey detections are unreliable. For the earlier USNO-A catalog (which was essentially a two-color, one-epoch catalog), this meant that the object must have had detectable fluxes on both the red and blue plates, and this led to the exclusion of many faint objects with non-neutral colors. Also, the larger epoch difference in the southern survey coverage meant that objects with larger proper motions tended to be excluded.