From: Jesper Norgaard Welen
The cities in Xinjiang I could find lies in the upper and lower part of the region, while there is a central zone where I could not find any cities that coincided with astro.com, but this might also be because it is a big desert area. Many counties have a name that corresponds to the city name also, so I could often find it that way, but not for the following counties:
Awati 40.11 80.57 Shaya 40.53 81.43 Kuche 41.77 83.51 Xinhe 41.34 82.13 Baicheng 42.07 81.97 Wensu 41.59 80.38 Wushi 41.20 79.13 Luntai 41.70 84.65 Yuli 40.83 87.00 Hejing 42.88 85.32
The coordinates above correspond to the approximate center of the county. I'm looking for cities near these county centers that would lie inside the county and exist in www.astro.com to produce a GMT offset for 1970. Can anyone help?
As is probably known the GeoNames database lists nearly every rock and creek with a name on it. http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html The China file is more than 20 MB large and has more than 160,000 entries. If you're interested, I managed to extract all 961 names lying in the rectangle with longitude 79-87 and latitude 39-44 deg. The list contains several alternative spellings and codes with type of location like populated place, main administrative division etcetera. The codes are explained on pages, found at earth-info.nga.mil. I can't say that a list with 960 names is a real help, but that's what I can offer.