View Full Version : Searchable Star catalogues?
Technical question here - I know the Hipparcos catalogue is a very good source of information on star locations and distances (especially the New Reduction, searchable using Vizier: http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=I/311/hip2 ), but are there any other catalogues that I could use to hunt down stars with that are fairly accurate? I'm specifically looking for catalogues that can give me the location of a star and the parallax. (this rules out Tycho, and possible 2MASS). I've already sucked the RECONS Near Star List (http://www.recons.org/TOP100.posted.htm) dry too, so I know about that one.
The reason I ask is that I'm trying to assemble a list of stars near Sol so I can enter them into Astrosynthesis, a 3D star mapping program. I've made one star list using the RECONS list, which covers up to 22.8 lightyears from Sol pretty thoroughly. I've used Hipparcos to get data for a bunch of stars beyond that distance, but I'm wondering if there are other catalogues that can "fill in the gaps" between some of the stars. I was wondering about 2MASS but I tried using that on Vizier and it didn't seem to want to give me distance info.
Any pointers would be appreciated!
Or I'll put it more specifically - I need to know if there are any known stars located directly between Xi Bootis (HIP 72659) and CE Bootis (HIP 72944).
How can I find this out? (given that I couldn't find any stars between them in RECONS or the New Reduction of Hipparcos)
glappkaeft
2012-Jan-17, 12:55 PM
You'd probably have to wait for ESA's Gaia mission to finish since its predecessor did the AFAICT most accurate mass-measurement of parallax. Unfortunately it will not launch until 2013.
StupendousMan
2012-Jan-17, 12:59 PM
SIMBAD has many catalogs full of information on nearby stars. A partial list is
http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?cat=gliese&find=+
I might recommend in particular the Gliese catalog, 1991 version:
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=V%2F70A
Yeah I'm familiar with the Gliese catalogue too, and it helped me find Gliese 569 (CE Bootis)... unfortunately there's nothing else from Gliese in the vicinity.
The Stellar Database (e.g. http://www.stellar-database.com/Scripts/search_star.exe?ID=106200 ) has a function to find all stars within a certain distance of the one you're looking at, but that's given me the stars I already know.
I did a coordinate search in SIMBAD too and didn't find anything other than what I'd already found too.
What about the Wolf, BD and HD catalogues? Do they have distance data too?
glappkaeft
2012-Jan-17, 10:15 PM
Y
What about the Wolf, BD and HD catalogues? Do they have distance data too?
Those are all more than 90 years old. Have you looked at PPM? I don't think it has distance data (parallax is very hard to measure) but it might be useful for further searches.
AFAIK the only other parallax catalog that is used seriously is "General Catalogue of Trigonometric Stellar Parallaxes, 4th Edition". It's not as good as Hipparcos but contains some stars not present in Hipparcos.
They may be old, but I managed to find a few stars in the Wolf catalogue that I didn't know about (that then turned out to be in the Gliese catalogue but I had no idea to search for those specific stars previously). The trick seems to be to use all available info - regardless of age - and put it all together to get what I need. The problem is finding all the sources for that information is and getting it in a usable form.
glappkaeft
2012-Jan-17, 11:12 PM
Then you should check USNO-B for candidate stars down to the magnitude of a M8 star at 20-30 ly (that's about the distance, right?) and then see if there are any non-catalogue parallax measurments for those stars in SIMBAD. I haven't look into it but you can do rather clever searches in that database.
I'm looking at the Yale Trigonometric Parallaxes, Fourth Edition (van Altena+ 1995) catalogue (I/238 on Vizier) and finding a few more stars...
There are some odd IDs in there though - some are listed as e.g. G 137-078, some are listed as Vys 740, and some are listed as B+21 2763 (is this BD? The format is similar) - anyone know what G, Vys, and B+ correspond to?
StupendousMan
2012-Jan-18, 01:27 AM
I'm looking at the Yale Trigonometric Parallaxes, Fourth Edition (van Altena+ 1995) catalogue (I/238 on Vizier) and finding a few more stars...
There are some odd IDs in there though - some are listed as e.g. G 137-078, some are listed as Vys 740, and some are listed as B+21 2763 (is this BD? The format is similar) - anyone know what G, Vys, and B+ correspond to?
See this document:
ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/IV%2F20/srccats.txt
G = Giclas, as in H.L.GICLAS, LOWELL PROPER MOTIONS, BULL. LOWELL OBS., NO.89, 1958.
(and many other collections)
Vys may be a misprint for VVS = A.N.VYSSOTSKY, DWARF M STARS FOUND SPECTROPHOTOMETRICALLY, I, IV.,
ASTROPHYS.J., 97, 381, 1943; ASTRONOM.J., 61, 201, 1956.
B+21 2763 is likely to be a misprint for "BD". There is a catalog in the document I mentioned
above which has an abbreviation "B", A.BRACCESI, CATALOGUE OF ULTRAVIOLET OBJECTS (MANUSCRIPT)., CIT. IN
ASTROPHYS. J., 152, L105, 1968. --- but that strikes me as unlikely.
You are discovering that astronomers have a very difficult time making any
complete count of stars out to what seem to be piddling little distances.
It's hard.
You are discovering that astronomers have a very difficult time making any
complete count of stars out to what seem to be piddling little distances.
It's hard.
Oh, I knew that :). I think Vizier and SIMBAD go a long way to making it easier to find those stars that have been catalogued though.
I'm still short of what I need though. I just need one lousy star that's within 7.7 lightyears of both Xi Bootis and CE Bootis (for a 2300AD RPG project, if anyone recognises the significance of the 7.7 ly number). I'm finding plenty around those two, but so far I can't find any between them (or that can chain together to connect them). I found a BD star that was close to Xi Bootis, but it wasn't within 7.7 ly of CE Bootis.
I'll keep hunting though...!
moozoo
2012-Jan-18, 07:31 AM
You are discovering that astronomers have a very difficult time making any
complete count of stars out to what seem to be piddling little distances.
It's hard.
It must be possible to estimate an upper and lower bound on the percentage of nearby stars we have found based on the average density of stars (for M class stars and brighter).
B+21 2763 is likely to be a misprint for "BD". There is a catalog in the document I mentioned
above which has an abbreviation "B", A.BRACCESI, CATALOGUE OF ULTRAVIOLET OBJECTS (MANUSCRIPT)., CIT. IN
ASTROPHYS. J., 152, L105, 1968. --- but that strikes me as unlikely.
I found an explanation on Vizier - yes, it is the BD catalogue!
StupendousMan
2012-Jan-18, 04:16 PM
It must be possible to estimate an upper and lower bound on the percentage of nearby stars we have found based on the average density of stars (for M class stars and brighter).
How can we measure the average density of M stars?
glappkaeft
2012-Jan-18, 06:38 PM
2300AD, wow that takes me back although I was more into Traveller and "Drakar och Demoner" (a Swedish BRP development). Have you tried just extracting all stars in SIMBAD with parallax less than some number? I just ran a quick "search by criterion" (plx <= 0.1) for stars with parallax less than 0.1 mas (~32 ly) and got 4900 hits which can be downloaded in Tab/Comma seperated textfiles and imported into excel/open office. You can also for instance add more critieria e.g. coordinate limits to narrow the search but the easiest way to get the most complete data would be to just do a inclusive search of the entire volume of space you are interested in.
Yeah, I figured out that I could enter ranges and export as a table (i.e. pretty much do exactly what you just said :) ), which makes it a lot easier to import the entire database into Astrosynthesis. And yay! I found a link using the Hipparcos stars alone (I just searched for all stars between parallax 0.06 and 0.14).
EDIT: I didn't find a link at all. I entered the wrong parallax range (doh!).
Surprisingly I only got about 355 stars in that range from Hipparcos (I got about 900 from the Yale catalogue, but I didn't actually get a connection between the stars that I wanted at all with that! But I figure it's less accurate than HIP anyway).
While I'm here, I'll mention this: http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/datenbanken/aricns/ which is also a handy way to find obscure stars from the Gliese, Giclas, Vys and other catalogues.
Either way, thanks for the help so far everyone - Hopefully this thread may be useful to others embarking on this sort of exercise!
Argh! I got the parallax units wrong (I entered them in arcseconds, not milliarcseconds) - that explains why I got so few stars, because it gave me ones that were REALLY far away (0.06 mas is about 55,000 lightyears!). SIgh. Back to the drawing board...!
EDIT: Yep, no such luck - even with 22000 added HIP stars, there's no connection between Xi Bootis and CE Bootis. Guess I'll have to just make up a connecting star then... :(
ngc3314
2012-Jan-19, 06:30 PM
How can we measure the average density of M stars?
It's not completely tautological - we can do deep surveys of old open clusters and get an idea of the relative numbers, in some ways easier than nearby from all-sky data.
Does anyone know of a way to correlate HIP numbers with star names? My 22,000 star list has just HIP numbers, and I'd like to be able to find out which ones already have other names (e.g. latin names like "Iota Horologii", or variable names like "CE Bootis"). It seems that some of the catalogues have the names included and others don't - I guess I'm looking for a way to cross-correlate them.
The only way I've been able to do that with the HIP numbers is to look up the star in Celestia (which usually lists other names), but that's rather time-consuming.
glappkaeft
2012-Jan-20, 04:28 AM
Does anyone know of a way to correlate HIP numbers with star names? My 22,000 star list has just HIP numbers, and I'd like to be able to find out which ones already have other names (e.g. latin names like "Iota Horologii", or variable names like "CE Bootis").
I don't know of any easy or bulletproof way of doing that although the Hipparcos catalogue itself contains some cross references. Search google for "cross identifying" and "cross referencing" Hipparcos for many discussions on the subject. It's a pity that not all star catalogues are cross referenced to the degree of the Washington Double Star catalogue but with todays huge machine created catalogues it's perhaps not surprising.
You'll need cross references to at least the Bayer designation ("Iota Horologii"), the Bayer variant used for variable names ("CE Bootis"), Flamsteed designation ("61 Cygnis") plus "common names" (Sirius).
Oo. I found this! http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=IV%2F27A
It's not complete (only 4308 entries) but it's a start!
Also, there's this huge list: http://www.sai.msu.su/groups/cluster/gcvs/gcvs/iv/crossid.dat
(from http://www.sai.msu.su/groups/cluster/gcvs/gcvs/new.htm )
I may have hit the jackpot - I found something called the "All-sky Compiled Catalogue of 2.5 million stars (Kharchenko+ 2009)" (I/280B on Vizier):
" The All-Sky Compiled Catalogue of 2501313 stars (ASCC-2.5) with the
limiting magnitude V=12-14 is a result of a merging of star lists from
present day large high-precision catalogues from space (Hipparcos-
Tycho family catalogues: Hipparcos main catalogue including Multiple
System Annex [I/239], Tycho-1 [I/239], Tycho-2 [I/259], ACT-RC [I/246],
TRC [I/250]) and ground-based (PPM-N [I/146], PPM-S [I/193], PPM-add
[I/208], CMC11 [I/256]) observations and reduction to standard systems
of corresponding stellar data. The data from the Tycho-2 Spectral Type
Catalog [III/231], and the 2MASS All-Sky Catalog of Point Sources
[II/246] are added."
It's ridiculous - the New Reduction of the HIP catalogue has about 20,000 stars within 300ly of Sol, but ASCC blew up my browser trying to show the table. The only table I could get it to show was for stars from 22.8 to 100ly and that was over 198,000 stars! I think it may use the pre-New Reduction Hipparcos data though. Does anyone know anything more about this catalogue?
OK, this may be a bit of a problem.
RECONS has 108 systems within about 7pc of Sol.
However, when I look at the ASCC data for parallax > 143.8 mas (the same distance), I get no less than 17,367 objects!!
That can't be right, surely? How can there be over a hundred times as many objects in ASCC within that distance?!
moozoo
2012-Jan-29, 09:51 AM
OK, this may be a bit of a problem.
RECONS has 108 systems within about 7pc of Sol.
However, when I look at the ASCC data for parallax > 143.8 mas (the same distance), I get no less than 17,367 objects!!
That can't be right, surely? How can there be over a hundred times as many objects in ASCC within that distance?!
From what I can tell the parallax's on ASCC include ones with a wide error margin (see e_Plx). The ones that have a Hipparcos number have a much lower parallax error.
I'm guessing this will be fixed with the Gaia mission.
From what I can tell the parallax's on ASCC include ones with a wide error margin (see e_Plx). The ones that have a Hipparcos number have a much lower parallax error.
I'm guessing this will be fixed with the Gaia mission.
Right, I won't bother with ASCC then. I'm looking forward to see what Gaia reveals! ;)
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