Celestia Forums

I am a new member of this forum and would like to know how to "add" or "create" a new catalog of stars to Celestial. Thanks

The Celestia Motherlode has a full catalog of TYC stars, which you can download here. Installation instructions are included.

Added after 12 minutes 14 seconds:
Note: The stars in the HD and SAO catalog are mostly contained in the TYC catalog. But, the add-on doesn't include cross-indices with all those new names, so if you you can't look up "HD 2", only "TYC 3660-43-1".

CU1500,

Stars can be added to Celestia using plain-text files called "STar Catalogs". They have a .STC "file type". Examples are in Celestia's data directory. A detailed description of the format is in the Celestia Wikibook at https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Celestia/STC_File

Very large STC files can take a while to load, so if you want to add more than a few thousand stars, you'll need to learn how to create a replacement binary catalog "stars.dat". At the moment, the best documentation is in the buildstardb.pl Perl script used to create it from Hipparcos catalog. See https://sourceforge.net/p/celestia/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/celestia/src/tools/stardb/