Which catalog is best?

I am looking for a good catalog of stars.

Nothing fancy - bare minimum would be:

Star Name
Spectral Class
R.A.
Dec
Distance from Sol


That's it.

A text file, comma separated value file, database or spreadsheet would be
great.
The simplier the better.

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

I'd buy a CD, pay-pal or Visa or whatever.

Stars, binaries, dwarfs, etc....

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.

lucyh at dhimaging dot com dot au

http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/

Sky Charts uses catalog extracts provided by these two institutions:
5/50 Bright Star Catalogue 5th Revised Ed. Hoffleit+ 1991
5/102 SKY2000 - Master Star Catalog Version 2 Sande+ 1998
1/197A Tycho Input Catalogue Revised version Egret+ 1992
1/239 The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues ESA 1997
1/259 The Tycho-2 Catalogue Hog+ 2000
1/220 The HST Guide Star Catalog Lasker+1992
1/237 The Washington Visual Double Star Catalog USNO 2000
2/214 General Catalog of Variable Stars Kholopov+ 1998
2/219 New Catalogue of Suspected Variable Stars Supplement
Kazarovets+ 1998
7/118 NGC 2000.0 Dreyer 1888, Sky Publishing ed. Sinnott1988
7/155 Third Reference Cat. of Bright Galaxies de Vaucouleurs+1991
7/119 Catalogue of Principal Galaxies Paturel+ 1999
5/84 Strasbourg-ESO Cat. of Galactic Planetary Nebulae Acker+1992
7/9 Lynds' Catalogue of Bright Nebulae Lynds 1965
7/202 Globular Clusters in the Milky Way Harris 1997
7/92A Open Cluster Data 5th Edition Lynga 1987
6/79 Lunar Solution ELP 2000-82B Chapront-Touze+ 1988
6/87 Planetary Ephemerides Chapront+ 1996
6/49 Constellation Boundary Data Davenhall+ 1989

"Lucy" wrote in message ...

I am looking for a good catalog of stars.

Nothing fancy - bare minimum would be:

Star Name
Spectral Class
R.A.
Dec
Distance from Sol


That's it.

A text file, comma separated value file, database or spreadsheet would be
great.
The simplier the better.

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

Most astronomical data is available online for free, starting at
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr.

I'm not sure what you want to do with your data, but I warn you that
you are likely to be biting off more than you can chew; star catalogs
can be pretty overwhelming.

I recommend starting with the Yale Bright Star Catalog; it is simple,
high-quality, complete, and not terribly huge -- just 9000 stars,
basically all the ones that are visible to the naked eye. After you've
played with that, you will have a better idea where you want to go next.

No catalog is complete to 200 light-years from Earth; in fact, the
overwhelming majority of stars within 200 l-y haven't even been detected
yet, much less cataloged. We are still discovering new stars just 20 l-y
from Earth!

Another way to start would be with the Tycho catalog.

- Tony Flanders

"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.

(Tom Kirke) writes:

"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.

An attempt to exhaustively survey _all_ stars down through M-type subdwarves
within a mere 10 parsecs (~32.6 ly) of Sol is curently being carried out
by the RECONS group: http://www.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/. To detect stars
out to 300 ly would obviously be much harder, since they would be up to
~100 times dimmer, and there will be ~1000 times as many stars to survey.

The 2MASS survey is attempting to detect all objects brighter than
1 mJy in the J, H, and K_s infrared bands,
http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/overview/about2mass.html;
this survey will hopefully detect many nearby L- and T-type brown dwarves,
http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/overview/dwarfs.html.
but will represent an exhaustive survey of them.


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'

CORRECTION --- I wrote:

The 2MASS survey is attempting to detect all objects brighter than
1 mJy in the J, H, and K_s infrared bands,
http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/overview/about2mass.html;
this survey will hopefully detect many nearby L- and T-type brown dwarves,
http://www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/overview/dwarfs.html.
but will represent an exhaustive survey of them.

The last line above should read: "Will _NOT_ represent an exhaustive survey
of them"... :-(


-- Gordon D. Pusch

perl -e '$_ = \n"; s/NO\.//; s/SPAM\.//; print;'