The catalog was constructed primarily to assist in the reduction and interpretation of planetary observations, particularly those made in the nineteenth century. The new catalog was considered necessary because the only fundamental catalogs available at the time (FK3, GC) have mean epochs around 1900, and over the period of approximately fifty years, positional accuracies had deteriorated from cumulative effects of proper motion inaccuracies. The ADC version of the data file was prepared from the original file by reformatting and incorporating changes to effect uniformity in the data fields. The notes file was created at the ADC by keying the information directly to disk storage. Cross checks were performed to assure that all stars flagged as having notes have entries in the notes file and that all notes are flagged in the data file.