astrodata
Star catalogs
Origins of the ancient constellations: II. The Mediterranean traditions. Rogers, J. H.
The classical map of the sky, with the 48 Greek constellations, was derived from at least two different pre-Greek traditions. One tradition comprised the 12 signs of the zodiac, with several associated animal constellations, all of which developed over ~3200–500 BC in Mesopotamia in a religious or ritual tradition. These were taken over by the Greeks around 500 BC. However the other Babylonian constellations, their farming-calendar tradition, were not adopted. The other tradition was not Mesopotamian; it comprised large constellations which appear to date from ~2800 BC, probably from the Mediterranean region, devised for the navigators of ships. They include huge bears and serpents which marked the celestial pole and equator at that time, and probably the four anonymous giants which we know as Hercules, Ophiuchus, Bootes, and Auriga, as well as some of the large southern ‘marine’ constellations. The origins of some other constellations, including the Perseus tableau and various animals, are unknown; they may have been new creations of the Greeks. The Greeks assembled the classical sky-map from these different sources between 540-370 BC, but many of the familiar legends were only applied to the constellations later.
Groups of constellations accoring to their meaning and probable origin:
- Landmarks of the Milky Way
- Bears, serpents, and giants: the ancient pole and equator
- The Zodiac
- The southern sea
- Two great southern myths
- The Andromeda legend
- Various animals and objects
Ptolemy’s Star Catalog
Ptolemy’s catalog contains 1028 entries representing 1025 distinct stars or nebulous objects (in three instances, listed below, two entries refer to the same star in the context of different constellations). It groups the stars into 48 constellations, the so-called 48 Ptolemaic constellations.
For each star, the catalog provides the ecliptic coordinates, the magnitude and, as a device to identify it uniquely, the description of its situation with respect to the constellation figure.
The data contains six different versions of the catalog.
The Almagest Ptolemy’s star catalogue (V/61)
This catalogue is the machine readable version of the star catalogue given by Claudius Ptolemy in his book called usually the Almagest. It is based upon its translation by K. Manitius (ed. B.G. Teubner, Leipzig 1913). The table reproduces the values given in book VII, chapter V, namely Identification, name, longitude, latitude and magnitude.
The star catalogues of Ptolemaios and Ulugh Beg. (2012)
In late antiquity and throughout the middle ages, the positions of stars on the celestial sphere were obtained from the star catalogue of Ptolemaios. A catalogue based on new measurements appeared in 1437, with positions by Ulugh Beg, and magnitudes from the 10th-century astronomer al-Sufi. We provide machine-readable versions of these two star catalogues, based on the editions by Toomer (1998) and Knobel (1917), and determine their accuracies by comparison with the modern Hipparcos Catalogue.
Star catalogue of Tycho Brahe (1627)
Tycho Brahe completed his catalogue with the positions and magnitudes of 1004 fixed stars in 1598. This catalogue circulated in manuscript form. Brahe edited a shorter version with 777 stars, printed in 1602, and Kepler edited the full catalogue of 1004 stars, printed in 1627.
The Bright Star Catalogue, 5th Revised Ed. (V/50, 1991)
The Bright Star Catalogue (BSC) is widely used as a source of basic astronomical and astrophysical data for stars brighter than magnitude 6.5.
Bonner Durchmusterung: I/122 (1903)
The Bonner Durchmusterung (BD, Argelander 1859–62, Kuestner 1903, Becker 1951, Schmidt 1968) is a visual survey of stars in the declination zones +89 to -01 degrees. The goal of the survey was to obtain a position and estimated visual magnitude for every star visible with the 78-mm Bonn telescope. Actual magnitude estimates were made and reported to 0.1 mag for all stars down to 9.5 mag, with fainter stars being assigned to 9.5. The BD actually contains a rather large number of stars fainter than 10.0 mag.
Henry Draper Catalogue and Extension: III/135A (1989)
An updated, corrected, and extended machine-readable version of The Henry Draper Catalogue (HD, Cannon & Pickering 1918–1924). The machine-readable portion of The Henry Draper Extension (HDE) (HA 100; Cannon 1925-1936) has been converted to the same format as the main catalog with additional data added as necessary.
The General Catalogue of Trigonometric Parallaxes, Fourth Edition: I/238A (1995)
This is a completely revised and enlarged edition of the General Catalogue of Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes containing 15,994 parallaxes for 8,112 stars published before the end of 1995. The mode of the parallax accuracy for the newly added stars (0.004” s.e.) is considerably better than in the previous editions (about 0.016”). Approximately 2300 stars are not in the Hipparcos Catalog.
See brief history of measuring parallaxes in Space astrometry with Gaia: Advances in understanding our Galaxy (2026)
The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues: I/239 (1997)
The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues are the primary products of the European Space Agency’s astrometric mission, Hipparcos. The satellite, which operated for four years, returned high quality scientific data from November 1989 to March 1993. Each of the catalogues contains a large quantity of very high quality astrometric and photometric data. In addition there are associated annexes featuring variability and double/multiple star data.
All-Sky Compiled Catalogue of 2.5 million stars: I/280B (Kharchenko+, 2009)
The All-Sky Compiled Catalogue of 2501313 stars (ASCC-2.5) with the limiting magnitude V=12–14 is a result of a merging of star lists from present day large high-precision catalogues from space and ground-based observations and reduction to standard systems of corresponding stellar data.
2MASS All-Sky Catalog of Point Sources: II/246 (2003)
The Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) project is designed to close the gap between our current technical capability and our knowledge of the near-infrared sky. 2MASS is uniformly scanning the entire sky in three near-infrared bands to detect and characterize point sources brighter than about 1 mJy in each band, with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) greater than 10, using a pixel size of 2.0”. 2MASS uses two new, highly-automated 1.3-m telescopes, one at Mt. Hopkins, AZ, and one at CTIO, Chile.
The USNO-B1.0 Catalog: I/284 (2003)
The USNO-B1.0 is a catalog that presents positions, proper motions, magnitudes in various optical passbands, and star/galaxy estimators for 1,045,913,669 objects derived from 3,648,832,040 separate observations. The data were taken from scans of 7,435 Schmidt plates taken from various sky surveys during the last 50 years. The catalog is expected to be complete down to V=21
The Guide Star Catalog, Version 2.3.2: I/305 (GSC2.3, 2006)
The GSC II is an all-sky catalog based on 1” resolution scans of the photographic Sky Survey plates, at two epochs and three bandpasses, from the Palomar and UK Schmidt telescopes (DSS).
The GSC2.3 has no magnitude limit. The parameters of the bright objects, overexposed on the Schmidt plates, are taken from the Tycho-2 (I/259) catalog.
The fourth U.S. Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC4, 2012)
UCAC4 is a compiled, all-sky star catalog covering mainly the 8 to 16 magnitude range in a single bandpass between V and R. Positional errors are about 15 to 20 mas for stars in the 10 to 14 mag range. Proper motions have been derived for most of the about 113 million stars utilizing about 140 other star catalogs with significant epoch difference to the UCAC CCD observations.
TESS Input Catalog version 8.2 (TIC v8.2): IV/39
The TESS Input Catalog Version 8 (TIC-8) presented in Stassun et al. (2019) was assembled based on the Gaia DR2 catalog, and augmented with data from many additional catalogs to create a full list of point sources and extended sources that could be observed by TESS.
TIC v8 was updated twice (2020 April (v8.1) and 2021 July (v8.2)) to identify objects that are included in the TIC, but are actually spurious objects or related to other TIC stars in a non-trivial, non-astrophysical way.
Gaia DR3 Part 1. Main source: I/355 (2022)
Gaia Data Release 3 (Gaia DR3) will be released on 13 June 2022. The Gaia DR3 catalogue builds upon the Early Data Release 3 (released on 3 December 2020) and combines, for the same stretch of time and the same set of observations, these already-published data products with numerous new data products such as extended objects and non-single stars.