... Generally, astronomical data archives are open to public. ... The data format?so called FITS. Yet, ASCII format catalogues are available (for example, VizieR , http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR) . ... Here, I attach an email from 2006 Astrostatics Summer School at PSU , who kindly answer to my question on how to read files in FITS format. ?????????????from Patrick . ... The tool you want in this package is called dmlist , with a syntax like this to dump the data to an ASCII file: . ...