Star catalog
A star catalog is a list listing the stars, as well as their positions, brightness, or any of their other characteristics. In astronomy, many stars are referred to simply by catalog numbers. There are many different star catalogs that have been produced for different purposes throughout history. This article covers only a few of the most cited.
The completeness and precision of the catalogs are described by the faintest apparent magnitude collected (the higher this number is, the more and more faint stars are included) and by the angular precision of the reported positions. Most modern catalogs are available in electronic format and can be freely downloaded from the space agencies data center.
Historical catalogues
Many different ancient peoples compiled star catalogues, including the Babylonian Empire, ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, China, Persia, and the Arab people.
Ancient Near East
From extant records, Egyptian astronomy is known to have compiled the names of only a few identifiable constellations and a list of thirty-six decanaries that were used as a star clock. they called the circumpolar star the star that cannot perish, and although they made no known formal star catalogues, they nevertheless created extensive star charts of the night sky that adorn sarcophagi and burial chamber ceilings.
Although the ancient Sumerians were the first to record the names of the constellations on clay tablets, the first star catalogs were compiled by Babylonian astronomers in Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC, during the Kassite period (1531 to 1155 BC). From this time of the Neo-Assyrian Empire comes the catalog known as "Three stars each". This catalog of stars, written on circular clay tablets, listed thirty-six stars ("three stars for each" one of the twelve months of the year, hence its name): twelve for 'Anu' at the celestial equator, twelve for 'Ea' south of east, and twelve for 'Enlil' to the north. The Mul.Apin lists, dated to sometime before the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626-539 BCE), are direct textual descendants of the 'Three Stars Each' lists. and their constellation patterns show similarities to those of the later Greek civilization.
Hellenistic world and Roman Empire
In ancient Greece, the astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus established the complete set of classical constellations around 370 BC. C.. the catalog of him Phaenomena , rewritten by Arato between 275 and 250 a. As a didactic poem, it became one of the most widely consulted astronomical texts since antiquity. It contains descriptions of the positions of the stars, the shapes of the constellations, and information provided about their relative times of rise and fall.
About III century BCE. C. the Greek astronomers Timocares of Alexandria and Aristilo created another catalog of stars. Hipparchus of Nicaea (c.190-c. 120 BC) completed his star catalog in 129 BC. C., which he compared with that of Timocares of Alexandria, and discovered that the length of the stars had changed over time. This led him to determine the first value of the precession of the equinoxes. In the II century, Claudius Ptolemy (c. 90 - c 186) Roman Egyptian astronomer published a star catalog as part of his Almagest, which listed 1022 stars visible from Alexandria. Ptolemy's catalog was based almost entirely on an earlier one by Hipparchus. It remained the standard star catalog in the Western world and among the Arabs for more than eight centuries. The Islamic astronomer abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi updated it in 964, and the positions of the stars were redetermined by Ulugh Beg in 1437, but it was not completely superseded until the appearance of Tycho Brahe's catalog of a thousand stars in 1598.
Although the Vedas, the work of ancient Indian astronomers, specified how the ecliptic was divided into twenty-eight nakshatra, the Indian constellation patterns were borrowed from the Greeks sometime after the conquest of Asia by Alexander the Great in the IV century B.C. C.
Ancient China
The earliest known inscriptions of Chinese star names were written on oracle bones and dated to the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600-c. 1050 BCE). Sources dating to the Zhou Dynasty (c.1050-256 BCE) provide names for stars, including the Zuo Zhuan, the Classic of Poetry, and the Canon of Yao (堯典) in the History Classic. The Lüshi Chunqiu, written by the statesman Qin Lü Buwei (circa 235 BC) provides most of the names for the twenty-eight mansions (that is, the twenty-eight asterisms located in the belt formed by the ecliptic of the celestial sphere, used to construct the Chinese calendar). A lacquered armor found in the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (buried in 433 BC) contains a complete list of the names of the twenty-eight mansions from the star catalogs. It is traditionally attributed to Shi Shen and Gan De, two little-known Chinese astronomers who may have been active in the fourth century BC, in the Warring States era (403-221 BC). The Shi Shen Astronomy (石 申天文, Shi Shen tienwen) is attributed to Shi Shen and Astronomical Stargazing (天文 星 Tian, Tianwen xingzhan) to Gan De.
It wasn't until the Han Dynasty (202 B.C.- A.D. 220) that astronomers began to observe and record names for all the stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky, not just the ones that encircled the ecliptic. They appear in one of the chapters of the late-century history work II a. C. Historical Memoirs by Sima Qian (145-86 BC), containing texts from the "school" of Shi Shen and the work of Gan De (with the different constellations that they supposedly established for astrological purposes). Sima's catalogue, the "Book of Heavenly Halls" (書官書 Tianguan shu), includes about 90 constellations. The stars are named after temples, philosophical ideas, generic places like markets and shops, and different people like farmers and soldiers. For his Spiritual Constitution of the Universe (靈憲, Ling Xian) of the year 120 d. C., the astronomer Zhang Heng (78-139 AD) compiled a stellar catalog made up of 124 constellations. The names of the Chinese constellations were later adopted by Koreans and Japanese.
Islamic World
Arab astronomers published a large number of star catalogs during the Golden Age of Islam. These were mainly Zij treatises, including Azarquiel's Tablas Toledo (1087); the Ilkhani Tables of the Maraghe Observatory (1272); and Ulugh Beg's Sultan Tables (1437). Other famous Arabian star catalogs include Alfraganus's Compendium of the Science of the Stars (850), which corrected Ptolemy's Almagest; and the Book of the fixed stars of Azophi from (964), describing observations of the stars, their positions, magnitudes, brightness, and color, drawings for each constellation, and early descriptions of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Cloud of Magellan. Many stars are still known by their Arabic names (see Appendix: Stars with Arabic names).
Pre-Columbian America
The Motul Dictionary, compiled in the XVI century by an anonymous author (although attributed to Fray Antonio de Ciudad Real), contains a list of stars originally observed by the ancient Maya. The Paris Codex, a Mayan work, also contains symbols for different constellations, represented by mythological beings.
Bayer and Flamsteed catalogues
Two systems for naming stars introduced in historical catalogs are still in use to this day. The first of these was devised by the German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572-1625), who used it for the first time in his work Uranometria, published in 1603. This system is used for bright stars, at which is awarded a letter of the Greek alphabet followed by the genitive of the constellation to which they belong. Examples of this naming system are Alpha Centauri or Gamma Cygni. The main problem with Bayer's naming system is the small number of letters in the Greek alphabet (24), so it was easy to run out of letters before running out of stars that needed naming, particularly for large constellations like Argo Navis. Bayer expanded its lists to 67 stars by using lowercase Roman letters ("a" through "z") and then uppercase ("A" through "Q&# 3. 4;). Few of those designations have survived. But it is worth mentioning, however, that it served as the starting point for the naming of variable stars, which begins with "R" to "Z"; then "RR", "RS", "RT"... "RZ", "SS" "ST"... "ZZ"; and beyond, adding more letters each time.
The second system comes from the English astronomer John Flamsteed (1646-1719). Flamsteed kept the constellation genitive rule for the later part of his catalog names, but used numbers instead of the Greek alphabet for the first part of the name. Examples of this system are 61 Cygni and 47 Ursae Majoris.
Complete Sky Catalogs
Bayer and Flamsteed covered only a few thousand stars between them. In theory, complete sky catalogs attempt to enumerate all the stars in the firmament. However, there are billions of stars that can be resolved with a telescope, so this is an impossible goal; with this type of catalog, an attempt is generally made to make each star that is included brighter than a given apparent luminous magnitude.
LALL
Joseph Lalande published the Histoire Céleste Française in 1801, a work that, among other things, contained an extensive catalog of stars. The observations were made from the Paris Observatory and therefore mainly describe stars in the northern hemisphere. This catalog contained the positions and magnitudes of 47,390 stars, up to magnitude 9, and was the most comprehensive catalog up to that time. A major revision of this catalog in 1846 added reference numbers, which are used to refer to some of these stars to this day. The acceptable accuracy of this catalog kept it in common use as a reference by observatories around the world during the 19th century.
HD/HDE
The Henry Draper catalog was published in the period 1918-1924. It covers the entire sky to about 9th or 10th magnitude, and is notable as the first large-scale attempt to classify stars within a catalogue.
It was compiled by Annie Jump Cannon and her collaborators at the Harvard College Observatory under the supervision of Edward Charles Pickering, and named after Henry Draper, whose widow donated the money required to finance it.
HD numbers (Henry Draper initials) are widely used today for stars that do not have a Bayer or Flamsteed designation. Stars numbered 1 through 225,300 are from the original catalog and are numbered in right ascension order for the astronomical epoch of 1900.0. Stars in the range 225,301 - 359,083 are from the 1949 extension of the catalogue. The HDE notation can be used for stars in this extension, but they are usually denoted HD as the numbering ensures that there can be no ambiguity.
SAO
The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) catalog was compiled in 1966 from several earlier astrometric catalogs, and contains only stars up to 9th magnitude, for which proper motions were known with precision. There is considerable overlap with the Henry Draper catalogue, but any stars lacking proper motion data are omitted. The epoch for position measurements in the latest edition is J2000.0. The SAO catalog contains this important information that does not appear in the Draper catalogue, the proper motion of stars, so it is often used when that fact is important. Cross references to the Draper and Durchmusterung catalog numbers in the latest edition are also helpful.
Names in the SAO catalog start with the letters SAO, followed by a number. Numbers are assigned following 18 ten-degree bands in the sky, with the stars ordered by their right ascension within each band.
BD/CD/CPD
The Bonner Durchmusterung (German: Bonn sampling) and its enlargements were the most complete pre-photographic star catalogs.
The Bonner Durchmusterung was published by Friedrich Argelander, Adalbert Krueger and Eduard Schönfeld between 1852 and 1859. It covered 320,000 stars in the epoch 1855.0.
As it covered only the northern and somewhat southern sky (compiled from the Bonn observatory), it was supplemented by the Südliche Durchmusterung (SD), which covers stars between the declinations -1 and -23 degrees. (1886, 120,000 stars). It was further expanded by the Bonner Durchmusterung (580,000 stars), which began to be compiled in Córdoba (Argentina) in 1892 under the initiative of John Macon Thome and covers declinations -22 to -90. Finally, the Cape Photographic Durchmusterung (450,000 stars, 1896), compiled in the Cape, South Africa, covers the declinations -18 to -90.
Astronomers prefer to use the HD designation for a star, since that catalog also provides spectroscopic information, but because the Durchmusterung cover more stars, they occasionally resort to older designations for one not found in the Draper catalog. Unfortunately, many catalogs cross-reference Durchmusterung without specifying which one is used in areas of overlap, so some confusion often results.
The star names in these catalogs include the initials of the four catalogs they come from (although the South follows the name Bonner and uses BD, the CPD is often shortened to CP), followed by the star's declination angle (rounded towards zero, and thus ranging from +00 to +89 and -00 to -89), followed by an arbitrary number, since that there are always thousands of stars at every angle. Examples include BD+50°1725 or CD-45°13677.
AC
The Catalogue astrographique (Astrographic Catalogue) was part of the international Carte du Ciel program, designed to photograph and measure the positions of all stars brighter than magnitude 11.0. In all, more than 4.6 million stars were observed, many as faint as 13th magnitude. This project started at the end of the XIX century. The observations were made between 1891 and 1950. In order to observe the entire celestial sphere without overloading too many institutions, the sky was divided among 20 observatories, by declination zones. Each observatory exposed and measured the plates in its area, using a standardized telescope (a 'normal astrograph') so that each plate imaged had a similar scale of approximately 60 arcseconds/mm. The United States Naval Observatory assumed custody of the catalogue, now in its 2000.2 edition.
USNO-B1.0
USNO-B1.0 is an all-sky catalog, created by research and operations astrophysicists at the United States Naval Observatory (developed at Flagstaff Station), featuring positions, proper motions, magnitudes in various bands optics and star/galaxy estimators for 1,042,618,261 objects derived from 3,643,201,733 separate observations. The data was obtained from scans of 7,435 plates taken with a Schmidt camera for various sky surveys conducted over the past 50 years. USNO-B1.0 is estimated to provide all-sky coverage, integrity up to V=21, astrometric accuracy to 0.2 arcseconds, photometric accuracy to 0.3 magnitude in up to five colors, and 85% accuracy in distinguishing stars from non-stellar objects. USNO-B is now followed by NOMAD; both can be found on the United States Naval Observatory server. The Naval Observatory in 2012 began work on the B2 and C variants of the USNO catalog series.
GSC
The Guide Star Catalog is an online star catalog produced for the purpose of accurately locating and identifying stars suitable for use as guide stars by the Hubble Space Telescope. The first version of the catalog was produced in the late 1980s by digitizing photographic plates and contained about 20 million stars, up to about magnitude 15. The latest version of this catalog contains information on 945,592,683 stars, up to magnitude 21. The latest version continues to be used to accurately point the Hubble Space Telescope.
Gaia Catalog
Gaia DR1 was the first publication of data collected by the Gaia space probe, launched with the mission of taking stellar data over 14 months of observations, conducted since September 2015. The published data includes positions and magnitudes in a single photometric band of 1.1 billion stars, including their positions, parallax, and the proper motions of more than 2 million stars, based on a combination of Gaia data. and the Tycho-2 catalog for objects listed in both catalogues, light curves and characteristics for about 3,000 variable stars, and positions and magnitudes for more than 2,000 extragalactic sources used to define the celestial reference frame. you can access the data for the DR1 version in the Gaia archive. The full Gaia catalog is scheduled to be published in 2022.
Specialized catalogues
Specialized catalogs are not intended to list all the stars in the sky, but instead work to collect a particular type of star, such as variable or nearest stars.
ADS
Aitken catalog of double stars
- New general catalogue of double stars within 120 degrees of the North Pole (1932, R. G. Aitken).
Enumerate 17,180 double stars north of -30 declination.
BS, BSC, HR
First published in 1930 as the "Yale Catalog of Bright Stars," this catalog contained information on all stars brighter than visual magnitude, 6.5 in the "Catalogue Photometry Revised from Harvard". The list was revised in 1983 with the publication of a supplement that listed additional stars up to magnitude 7.1. The catalog details the coordinates of each star, proper motion, photometry, stellar classification, and other useful information.
The last printed version of the Bright Star Catalogue was the revised 4th edition, released in 1982. The 5th edition is in electronic format and is available online.
Carbon stars
Stephenson's General Catalog of Galactic Carbon Stars is a catalog of more than 7,000 carbon stars.
Gl, GJ, Wo
The Gliese (later Gliese-Jahreiß) catalog attempts to list all star systems within 20 parsecs (65 light-years) of Earth, ordered by right ascension (see Annex: Nearest Stars). Later editions expanded coverage to 25 parsecs (82 light-years). Numbers in the range 1.0-915.0 (Gl numbers) are from the second edition, which was:
- Near Star Catalog (1969, W. Gliese).
Integers up to 915 represent systems that were in the first edition. Numbers with a decimal point were used to insert new star systems for the second edition without destroying the desired order (by right ascension). This catalog is known as CNS2, although this name is never used in catalog numbers.
Numbers in the range 9001-9850 (Wo numbers) are from the supplement:
- "Gliese catalogue extension" (1970, R. Woolley, E. A. Epps, M. J. Penston and S. B. Pocock).
Numbers in the ranges 1000-1294 and 2001-2159 (GJ numbers) are from the supplement:
- "Data from nearby stars published 1969-1978" (1979, W. Gliese and H. Jahreiß).
The range 1000-1294 represents nearby stars, while 2001-2159 represents suspected nearby stars. In the literature, GJ numbers are sometimes extended retroactively to Gl numbers (since there is no overlap). For example, Gliese 436 can be referred to interchangeably as Gl 436 or GJ 436.
Numbers in the range 3001-4388 are from:
- Preliminary version of the third catalogue of nearby stars (1991, W. Gliese and H. Jahreiß).
Although this version of the catalog was called "preliminary", it is still the current A 2006 version and is known as CNS3. It lists a total of 3803 stars. Most of these stars already had GJ numbers, but there were also 1,388 that were not numbered. The need to give these 1388 stars some name has resulted in their being numbered 3001-4388 (numbers NN, for "No Name", & #34;unnamed"), and the data files in this catalog now generally include these numbers. An example of a star often referred to as having one of these unofficial GJ numbers is Gliese 3021.
GCTP
The General Catalog of Trigonometric Parallaxes, first published in 1952 and later superseded by the New GCTP (now in its fourth edition), covers almost 9000 stars. Unlike Gliese, it does not intersect at a given distance from the Sun; rather it attempts to catalog all known measured parallaxes. It gives the coordinates in the epoch 1900, the secular variation, the proper motion, the weighted average absolute parallax and its standard error, the number of parallax observations, the quality of the correlation of the different values, the visual magnitude and various cross identifications. with other catalogues. Ancillary information includes UBV photometry, MK spectral types, data on the variability and binary nature of stars, orbits when available, and miscellaneous information to help determine the reliability of the data listed.
- Louise F. Jenkins, Yale University Observatory, 1952 edition and 1962 supplement.
- William F. van Altena, John Truen-liang Lee and Dorrit Hoffleit, Yale University Observatory, 1995.
HIP
The Hipparcos program was compiled from data collected by the European Space Agency's Hipparcos astrometric satellite, which was in operation from 1989 to 1993. The catalog was published in June 1997 and contains 118,218 stars; an updated version with reprocessed data was published in 2007. It is particularly notable for its parallax measurements, which are considerably more accurate than those produced by ground-based observations.
PPM
The PPM Star Catalog is one of the best, both in straight motion and star position up to 1999. Not as accurate as the Hipparcos catalog, but has many more stars. The PPM was created from BD, SAO, HD and more, with a sophisticated algorithm and is an extension of the Fifth Fundamental Catalogue, "Fundamental Katalog".
Catalog of straight movement
A common way to detect nearby stars is to look for relatively high proper motions. There are several catalogues, some of which are mentioned. The Ross and Wolf catalogs were pioneers in this field:
- Ross, Frank Elmore, New Proper Motion Stars eight successive lists, Astronomical Journal vol. 36-48, 1925-1939
- Wolf, Max, "Katalog von 1053 stärker bewegten Fixsternen", Veröff. re. Badischen Sternwarte zu Heidelberg (Königstuhl), Bd. 7, n. 10, 1919; and numerous lists in Astronomische Nachrichten 209-236, 1919-1929
Willem Jacob Luyten later produced a series of catalogues:
L - Luyten Catalogue, proper motion stars and white dwarfs:
- Luyten, W. J., Proper Motion Survey with the forty-eight inch Schmidt Telescope, University of Minnesota, 1941 (General Catalogue of the Bruce Proper-Motion Survey)
LFT - Luyten Five-Tenths Catalogue:
- Luyten, W. J., A Catalog of 1849 Stars with Proper Motion exceeding 0.5" annually, Lund Press, Minneapolis (Mn), 1955 ([1])
LHS - Luyten Half-Second Catalogue:
- Luyten, W. J., Catalogue of stars with proper motions exceeding 0"5 annuallyUniversity of Minnesota, 1979 ([2])
LTT - Luyten Two-Tenths Catalogue:
- Luyten, W. J. Luyten's Two Tenths. A catalogue of 9867 stars in the Southern Hemisphere with proper motions exceeding 0".2 annuallyMinneapolis, 1957; A catalogue of 7127 stars in the Northern Hemisphere with proper motions exceeding 0".2 annually`, Minneapolis, 1961; also supplements 1961–1962. ([3][4][5])
NLTT - New Luyten Two-Tenths catalogue:
- Luyten, W. J., New Luyten Catalogue of stars with proper motions larger than two tenths of an arcsecond (NLTT), Univ. of Minnesota, 1979, supplement 1980 ([7][8])
LPM - Luyten Proper-Motion Catalogue:
- Luyten, W. J., Proper Motion Survey with the 48 inch Schmidt TelescopeUniversity of Minnesota, 1963–1981
- LP numbers: L in zones −45 to −89 deg.; LP in zones +89 to −44 deg.
Around the same time period, Henry Lee Giclas worked on a similar series of catalogues:
- Giclas, H. L., et al., Lowell Proper Motion Survey, Lowell Observatory Bulletin1971-1979 ([9])
Uvby98
The "ubvyβ photoelectric photometric catalogue" is a compilation of previously published photometric data. Published in 1998, the catalog includes 63,316 stars collected up to 1996.
Successors to USNO-A, USNO-B, NOMAD, UCAC and others
Stars evolve and move over time, making catalogs evolve, making databases non-permanent even at the most rigorous levels of production. USNO Catalogs are the most current and widely used astrometric catalogs available today, and include USNO products such as USNO-B (the successor to USNO-A), NOMAD, UCAC, and others in production or published. Some users can see specialized catalogs (newer versions of the previous ones), adapted catalogs, catalogs produced by interferometry, dynamic catalogs and those with updated positions, movements, colors and errors improved. Catalog data is continuously collected at the Naval Observatory's deep sky facility; and the latest updated and refined catalogs are reduced and produced by NOFS and the USNO. See the USNO Catalog and Image Servers for more information.
Related reading
- Newton, Robert R. (1977). The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Rawlins, Dennis (1982). «An investigation of the ancient star catalog». Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 94: 359-373. Bibcode:1982PASP...94..359R. doi:10.1086/130991.