Which catalog is best?

"Lucy" wrote in message
...

I am looking for a good catalog of stars.

[ snip ]

If it could go out to 200 to 300 light years, it would be great.

The ESO has just announced a paper:

"The Geneva-Copenhagen survey of the Solar neighbourhood: Ages,
metallicities and kinematic properties of ~14,000 F and G dwarfs"

by B. Nordström et al. The full article is available in PDF format here.

http://www.edpsciences.org/papers/aa...ses/aa0959.pdf

In the paper the give the address of the electronic form of the catalog
of the 14k stars. IIRC this goes to about 140 ly, within this distance
I estimate there are about 3x that many stars. This is a guess based
on the Initial Mass Function ( more K & M stars, fewer OBAs ), but
it is only a guess. Based on this a complete catalog to 300 ly would
have about 330k entries.

Dark skies,

tom

--
We have discovered a therapy ( NOT a cure )
for the common cold. Play tuba for an hour.