Celestia Forums

I'm a new user of Celestia, but *really* loving the program and grateful to Chris Laurel for making it available and maintaining it and to the community for the add-ons and extra development.

I've used the forum search, but haven't found any threads touching upon this issue. My question is :

Why are star names truncated (for those stars that have classical names) ?

For instance, when I right-click on HD 2151, the name showing is "BET Hyi" (Beta Hydri ?).

Have the star names been abbreviated to keep the file size of starnames.dat down? Some other reason?

I've seen other stars.dat available for download. Has anyone prepared a starnames.dat containing the full names of stars with classical names?

The alphabetic starnames are defined in /data/starnames.dat

It's just a flat text file. The first field on each line is the star's Hipparcos number. The other fields are other names for the same star, separated by colons (:). You can add whatever names you like.

I agree that it'd be nice if the spelled out Bayer (Greek) star names and the full constellation names were included. A rather simple script could make those additions to the file. (additions, not replacements!) I suspect Chris would be glad to distribute such an expanded list with Celestia. In principle, Celestia could do the three-letter to full name expansion at runtime, but I don't think all the code is in place to do that.

My understanding is that the abbreviations that Celestia uses actually are the formal names by which those stars are designated in modern professional star catalogs. Presumably this (2 or 3) + 3 character convention was created in order to simplify and speed up computerized cataloging when computers were rather more limited than they are today. The "spelled out" Bayer names familiar to many people are considered the "popular" forms of those names, I think.