Star catalogue
Star catalogues were compiled by many different ancient people, including the Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Persians, and Arabs.
Most modern catalogues are available in electronic format and can be freely downloaded from space agencies' data centres.
[6] In Ancient Greece, the astronomer and mathematician Eudoxus laid down a full set of the classical constellations around 370 BC.
[7] His catalogue Phaenomena, rewritten by Aratus of Soli between 275 and 250 BC as a didactic poem, became one of the most consulted astronomical texts in antiquity and beyond.
[7] It contained descriptions of the positions of the stars and the shapes of the constellations, and provided information on their relative times of rising and setting.
[7] Approximately in the 3rd century BC, the Greek astronomers Timocharis of Alexandria and Aristillus created another star catalogue.
The Islamic astronomer al-Sufi updated it in 964, and the star positions were redetermined by Ulugh Beg in 1437,[13] but it was not fully superseded until the appearance of the thousand-star catalogue of Tycho Brahe in 1598.
A very interesting and exhaustive discussion about the planetary positions along with specific name of constellations appears in a paper by R N Iyengar in the Indian Journal of History of Science.
[15] The earliest known inscriptions for Chinese star names were written on oracle bones and date to the Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1050 BC).
[16] Sources dating from the Zhou dynasty (c. 1050 – 256 BC) which provide star names include the Zuo Zhuan, the Shi Jing, and the "Canon of Yao" (堯典) in the Book of Documents.
[17] The Lüshi Chunqiu written by the Qin statesman Lü Buwei (d. 235 BC) provides most of the names for the twenty-eight mansions (i.e. asterisms across the ecliptic belt of the celestial sphere used for constructing the calendar).
An earlier lacquerware chest found in the Tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (interred in 433 BC) contains a complete list of the names of the twenty-eight mansions.
[20] It was not until the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) that astronomers started to observe and record names for all the stars that were apparent (to the naked eye) in the night sky, not just those around the ecliptic.
[21] A star catalogue is featured in one of the chapters of the late 2nd-century-BC history work Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (145–86 BC) and contains the "schools" of Shi Shen and Gan De's work (i.e. the different constellations they allegedly focused on for astrological purposes).
[22] Sima's catalogue—the Book of Celestial Offices (天官書 Tianguan shu)—includes some 90 constellations, the stars therein named after temples, ideas in philosophy, locations such as markets and shops, and different people such as farmers and soldiers.
The Motul Dictionary, compiled in the 16th century by an anonymous author (although attributed to Fray Antonio de Ciudad Real), contains a list of stars originally observed by the ancient Mayas.
These are given a Greek letter followed by the genitive case of the constellation in which they are located; examples are Alpha Centauri or Gamma Cygni.
It kept the genitive-of-the-constellation rule for the back end of his catalogue names, but used numbers instead of the Greek alphabet for the front half.
Jérôme Lalande published the Histoire céleste française in 1801, which contained an extensive star catalog, among other things.
It was further supplemented by the Cordoba Durchmusterung (580,000 stars), which began to be compiled at Córdoba, Argentina in 1892 under the initiative of John M. Thome and covers declinations −22 to −90.
It covers the whole sky down to about ninth or tenth magnitude, and is notable as the first large-scale attempt to catalogue spectral types of stars.
The catalogue was compiled by Annie Jump Cannon and her co-workers at Harvard College Observatory under the supervision of Edward Charles Pickering, and was named in honour of Henry Draper, whose widow donated the money required to finance it.
To observe the entire celestial sphere without burdening too many institutions, the sky was divided among 20 observatories, by declination zones.
The catalogue detailed each star's coordinates, proper motions, photometric data, spectral types, and other useful information.
There is considerable overlap with the Henry Draper catalogue, but any star lacking motion data at that time is omitted.
The SAO catalogue contains this major piece of information not in Draper, the proper motion of the stars, so it is often used when that fact is of importance.
The first version of the catalogue was produced in the late 1980s by digitizing photographic plates and contained about 20 million stars, out to about magnitude 15.
Numbers with a decimal point were used to insert new star systems for the second edition without destroying the desired order (by right ascension).
Numbers in the range 3001–4388 are from Although this version of the catalogue was termed "preliminary", it is still the current one as of March 2006[update], and is referred to as CNS3.
The General Catalogue of Trigonometric Parallaxes, first published in 1952 and later superseded by the New GCTP (now in its fourth edition), covers nearly 9,000 stars.
