Star catalogue | EPFL Graph Search

A star catalogue is an astronomical catalogue that lists stars. In astronomy, many stars are referred to simply by catalogue numbers. There are a great many different star catalogues which have been produced for different purposes over the years, and this article covers only some of the more frequently quoted ones. Star catalogues were compiled by many different ancient people, including the Babylonians, Greeks, Chinese, Persians, and Arabs. They were sometimes accompanied by a star chart for illustration. Most modern catalogues are available in electronic format and can be freely downloaded from space agencies' data centres. The largest is being compiled from the spacecraft Gaia and thus far has over a billion stars. Completeness and accuracy are described by the faintest limiting magnitude V (largest number) and the accuracy of the positions. From their existing records, it is known that the ancient Egyptians recorded the names of only a few identifiable constellations and a list of thirty-six decans that were used as a star clock. The Egyptians called the circumpolar star "the star that cannot perish" and, although they made no known formal star catalogues, they nonetheless created extensive star charts of the night sky which adorn the coffins and ceilings of tomb chambers. Although the ancient Sumerians were the first to record the names of constellations on clay tablets, the earliest known star catalogues were compiled by the ancient Babylonians of Mesopotamia in the late 2nd millennium BC, during the Kassite Period (c. 1531 BC to c. 1155 BC). They are better known by their Assyrian-era name 'Three Stars Each'. These star catalogues, written on clay tablets, listed thirty-six stars: twelve for "Anu" along the celestial equator, twelve for "Ea" south of that, and twelve for "Enlil" to the north. The Mul.Apin lists, dated to sometime before the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 BC), are direct textual descendants of the "Three Stars Each" lists and their constellation patterns show similarities to those of later Greek civilization.

Gaia's brightest very metal-poor (VMP) stars Metallicity catalogue of a thousand VMP stars from Gaia's radial velocity spectrometer spectra

Nicolas Lawrence Etienne Longeard

Context. Gaia DR3 has offered the scientific community a remarkable dataset of approximately one million spectra acquired with the radial velocity spectrometer (RVS) in the calcium II triplet region, which is well suited to identify very metal-poor (VMP) s ...

Edp Sciences S A2024

Gaia Focused Product Release: Sources from Service Interface Function image analysis Half a million new sources in omega Centauri

Stephan Morgenthaler, Shuangqing Liao

Context.Gaia's readout window strategy is challenged by very dense fields in the sky. Therefore, in addition to standard Gaia observations, full Sky Mapper (SM) images were recorded for nine selected regions in the sky. A new software pipeline exploits the ...

Les Ulis Cedex A2023