NAME

The name of the column. The rules for column names are as follows.

• The name must be unique within the totality of parameters and columns for the catalogue. This condition is necessary in order that a component (parameter or column) may be identified unambiguously when its name is used in an expression (see Appendix ).

• A name may comprise up to fifteen characters. This value is chosen for consistency with HDS and is adequate for FITS tables.

• The name can contain only: upper or lower case alphabetic characters (a-z, A-Z), numeric characters (0-9) and the underscore character (`_'). Note that lower case alphabetic characters must be allowed in order to access existing FITS tables. However, corresponding upper and lower case characters are considered to be equivalent. Thus, for example, the names: HD_NUMBER, HD_Number and hd_number would all refer to the same column.

• The first character must be a letter.