Celestia Forums

in this site:

http://www.astronexus.com/data/hyg.htm

there is this file:

http://www.astronexus.com/data/hyg.csv.zip

it is a stellar database ( it is a csv file but is very easy to convert in xls file)


About the HYG Database
The database is a subset of the data in three major catalogs: the Hipparcos Catalog, the Yale Bright Star Catalog (5th Edition), and the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars (3rd Edition). Each of these catalogs contains information useful to amateur astronomers:

The Hipparcos catalog is the largest collection of high-accuracy stellar positional data, particularly parallaxes, which makes it useful as a starting point for stellar distance data.
The Yale Bright Star Catalog contains basic data on essentially all naked-eye stars, including much information (such as the traditional Bayer Greek letters and Flamsteed numbers) missing from many other catalogs
The Gliese catalog is the most comprehensive catalog of nearby stars (those within 75 light years of the Sun). It contains many fainter stars not found in Hipparcos.
The name of the database comes from the three catalogs comprising its data: Hipparcos, Yale, and Gliese.

All told, this database contains ALL stars that are either brighter than magnitude +7.5 or within 50 parsecs (about 160 light years) from the Sun -- a total of 31,859 stars.

The database is a comma separated values (CSV) file that can be imported into most database and spreadsheet programs. Uncompressed, it is 3.49 MB. On this web site it is stored as a Zip file, which most popular unzippers can open. (like as xls it's 10MB!!!)

enjoy!!!

Bruno

mmm. all right I have 2 questions.
1) how many are the stars catalogued in celestia 1.2.4?
2) How do I update this catalog with the file you posted?

thanks much!

Well, celestia 1.2.4 have the file stars.dat that derives from the file of Hipparcos, that contains around 100000 stars, you can see their names in the file starname.dat (both they are in the directory “data”).
There are two ways to add other stars: or you use the program “CstarConv” to extract the catalog star.dat in xml format (but on my computer it doesn't work), and this program you can find it on the site:

http://spacegear.org/software/CStarsConv/index.html

You see the topicses to the page:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=696

or you can add “manually” the stars with their coordinates in this way:

(Rassilon wrote…)
You can now add the stars in manually using the stc format...They are saved like an ssc file in the Extras directory...

Heres is sample code used in a stc file....
Code:

# Sirius B
300001 {
RA 101.2886
Dec -16.71314306
Distance 8.601223
SpectralType "D"
AppMag 15
}


You will however have to add the name in starnames.dat like so

300001:Sirius B

You can read to the page:

http://www.celestiaproject.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=361

I hope to be you useful..

Bruno