Gaia DR2 positions and other news

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Wed, 04/25/2018 - 17:45

Dear all,

Gaia DR2 is now available through VizieR. Please use the Gaia DR2 J2000.0 positions computed by VizieR for all revisions and new submissions to VSX from now on (instead of using UCAC4, PPMXL, 2MASS, etc. Keep using them in case the star is not in Gaia DR2).

Eventually we'll see how to improve our current positions to Gaia DR2 positions too.

In other news, The Kepler K2 catalogue and other Kepler variables have been imported to VSX.
More ASAS-SN, SuperWASP and OGLE variables will follow. And eventually, the recent ATLAS variable stars catalogue.
We almost have 540,000 variable objects now in our database.

Thanks for contributing with VSX.

Sebastian

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Epoch Photometry

Has GAIA released any epoch photometry?  Poking around on their website, I don't see it.

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
My question may be stupid but

My question may be stupid but, is it possible to download Gaia DR2 to serve as a standard catalog, like we already do with UCAC4, PPMXL and URAT1?
Otherwise it is not very easy!

Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Use VizieR

As with all the information gathered to prepare a VSX submission or revision, just look up the star in VizieR (you can use the VSX external links to get there after a positional search). All the information is available there, including Gaia DR2 data.

Cheers,
Sebastian