Star Catalogues

> Star Catalogues

Except for the comparatively few stars visible to the naked eye, stars are named by numbers according to the various star atlases and catalogues issued by astronomical observatories. The first such star catalogue was compiled by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd century ad. Called the Almagest, it listed the names and locations of 1,028 stars. In 1603 a star atlas was published in Augsburg by the German astronomer Johann Bayer. Bayer listed a much larger number of stars than did Ptolemy, and he designated stars by a Greek letter and the constellation, or the celestial configuration, in which the star appears.

Your browser does not support inline frames or is currently configured not to display inline frames.

In the 18th century the English astronomer John Flamsteed also published an atlas in which stars were named according to their constellation, but Flamsteed differentiated them with numbers rather than letters. This atlas contained the locations of approximately 3,000 stars. The first modern star catalogue, that issued in 1862 by the observatory of Bonn, in Germany, contains the locations of more than 300,000 stars.

In 1887 an international committee began work on an elaborate star catalogue. It was compiled from photographs taken by about 20 collaborating observatories, comprising some 21,600 individual plates, showing some 8 to 10 million stars.

Modern catalogues of stars consist not of books, but of copies of glass photographic plates taken with large wide-field telescopes. The first such major survey was completed in the mid-1950s, using the 48-in (1.22-m) Schmidt telescope on Mount Palomar. Each plate covers a region of the sky 6° by 6°, and 1,035 charts cover all the sky visible from Mount Palomar. Corresponding set of charts of the southern sky have been made by the use of Schmidt telescopes in Australia and Chile.

[Back] [Top] [Next]