Celestia Forums

I've been lurking around long enough to notice that Celestia (via nearstars.ssc) uses the RECONS 100 closest stars list for some of its nearby star information.

Well, an updated version has recently been released/posted: http://www.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.posted.htm

The biggest change in this update is probably that the Hipparcos parallaxes have been replaced with revised Hipparcos parallaxes from van Leeuwen (2007), just like Celestia did with the main stellar database in version 1.6.0. There are also new parallaxes incorporated into the list from papers published in 2009, and as before more than 100 stars in the list. Do be warned, though, the GJ 2130 (the 'excused' candidate) was not updated. Just checked that with VizieR.

Just thought The Powers That Be (Grant Hutchinson?) would like to know.

It's taken a while, but I've now commited a revised version of nearstars.stc, incorporating the latest RECONS list. I've also changed the spelling of Rigil Kentaurus in that file to match common usage, as is now reflected in the updated starnames.dat I've also commited.

Grant

You may also be interested in this file (I apologize for not pointing it out before you before you updated nearstars.stc
http://www.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/publishedpi

That file contains every parallax RECONS has published thus far, from the CTIO 0.9m program.

Some warnings:

• It's missing parallaxes from the short-lived CTIO 1.5m program.
• It contains duplicate parallaxes for several stars, as noted in the margins. The more recent parallax supercedes the previous one and should not be combined
• The parallaxes are only the ones reported by RECONS, they are not weighted means of every measurement available (several of the stars are in YPC and Hipparcos) like the TOP100 list.

Obviously, it's also got a lot of other extraneous information too. The absolute trigonometric parallaxes are in the "pi_abs" column, and the next one is the full error.

The listed coordinates are 2MASS positions corrected to their J2000 E2000 location. When there's two components, the positions usually refers to the A component with the 'A' proper motion.
Riedel 2010, at least, published separate coordinates for each resolved component, slid to J2000 E2000 with their own relative RECONS proper motion.

Actually, I'll come up with a better file for you, with the 1.5m results and one weighted mean per system.

...and I realized nearstars.ssc goes out to 25 LIGHT YEARS... There isn't quite as much in the RECONS file that would help you there.