AUTOSTAR INFORMATION Last updated: 12 August 2001

STAR CATALOGS, DATABASES, and LISTS

Sent:	Friday, August 10, 2001 22:21:07
From:	EdHiker@mediaone.net (Ed Johnson)
STAR CATALOGS, DATABASES, and LISTS

This started when I looked for a listing of stars by name, 
about 300 names. Of more than 4000 catalogs, no good result.
 My ideal list will have, in sortable fields(Excel):

1- Common Name
2- SAO number
3- HR  number
4- Bayer/Flamsteed designations.
5- RA
6- DEC
7- Magnitude
8- Spectral class
9- Notes,  (Dbl, Var, etc.)
   The list should print on about four pages. 

Some interesting star lists were found...

USNO-A2.0 contains entries for over a half billion stars 
(526,230,881, to be exact!) For the entire northern sky,
and to declinations of -30.   6.6 GBytes of data.
http://ftp.nofs.navy.mil/projects/pmm/catalogs.html

List of Catalogs on the "Selected Astronomical Catalogs"
adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/adc/cdrom1_lis.html

Astronomical Data Center (ADC) CATALOG VIEWER
The Catalog Viewer allows the user to browse and visualize
the ADC catalogs or journal tables.
adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/viewer/

The Strasbourg astronomical Data Center (CDS) collects and 
distributes astronomical data catalogues. 
4050 Catalogues available from CDS ... 
 of which 3428 are available on-line (full ASCII or FITS files)  
 of which 3125 are also available through the VizieR browser.
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad

Start AladinJava for a view of the optical sky centered
on the above CDS catalogs.   GREAT! 
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinJava?
A number of stars has been assigned proper names historically from
various cultures, especially the brighter stars. Discussion is at:
http://www.seds.org/~spider/spider/Misc/naming.html
A named star list, having no magnitudes (until link is accessed) is at:
www.absoluteastronomy.com/stars.htm

Another "List of Named Stars in Alphabetical Order" is at
http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/starname_list.html

Another is at Fourmilab (Home Planet),
http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/catalogues/starname.html

Richard Seymour made a named star list, sorted by the name, 
has the  SAO numbers (for Autostar lookup), the HR  numbers
and the Bayer/Flamsteed designations.
http://staff.washington.edu/seymour/astro/longname-sao-hr.txt


The largest SORTABLE database, in Excel is at 
ftp://ftp.cts.com/users/s/c/scottb80/outgoing/

Final size is 3.2 megabytes.  By Scott,  mapug@shore.net
Still no complete listing of common star names!  Great work! 
The list of the contents is as follows... 

> The Complete New General Catalog of Nebula and Star Clusters 
> Messier Objects by Multiple Sources 
> The Caldwell Catalog 
> Lynds' Catalogue of Bright Nebulae 
> Lynds' Catalogue of Dark Nebulae 
> Barnard's Catalogue of 349 Dark Objects 
> Herschel 400 
> Dyer Finest NGC and Deep-Sky Challenge Objects 
> DOC G's Interesting Objects Listed By Size by R. A. Greiner 
> Double Stars by David Abrams 
> Arp Globular Clusters 
> Star Clusters and Associations, Selected Data (Alter+ 1970) 
> Revised Shapley-Ames Catalog of Bright Galaxies 
> Cool Galatic Carbon Stars 
> Meteor Shower Radiants 
> 105 Finest Objects For The LX200 by Nigel Puttick 
> Meade 351 Star Database by Alistair Symon etal 
> Greek Alphabet by the Greeks 

And so in comes Dick Seymour:

So, as i'm polishing off the extraneous lines in the spreadsheet,
my blood runs cold with the sudden thought: "what did Ed -mean-
by the term "names"?"

I -took- it to mean "popular names" (like Polaris)...
but (shudder) perhaps he meant "any names", like "47 Tucanae."
... i sure hope not.

326 stars.  Sorted by popular name. (Names1)

So here's the spreadsheet... this represents a few hours work
by my wife... mainly due to a bug in Access97 which is fixed in
Access2000... (i.e. the problems went away when she moved to
a different system, since she suspected as much).

Click here for the Excel spreadsheet (156K).

Click here for a tab-separated text file (84K). 

This has far -more- info that Ed requested, but it's easy enough
to delete (or hide) columns than to add'em.

My apologies for splitting the RA/Dec into separate Hr:Min:sec.xx
columns... it seemed a good idea at the time...

All errors are mine (plus the conversion precess).
If you wish the *full* database/spreadsheet (the entire HR catalog,
 with ALL notes crammed in for each star) it's available.
It's a 1.6 meg zip file, 4.5 meg unpacked.

All hard work is my wife's (thanks, Karen...)
--dick

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