Updated stars.dat for Celestria using Gaia data

[selden]

Here's a link to my update for Celestia's stars.dat which incorporates distances from Gaia DR1. It includes both a modified stars.dat and an STC catalog that updates the stars.dat that comes with Celestia. If you choose to use the STC catalog, it causes Celestia to load quite slowly.

gaia_stardb.zip (2.7MB, expands to 5.4MB)

While creating it, I discovered that Gaia DR1 includes data for fewer than 80% of the Hipparcos stars. Hopefully DR2 will include them all.

Here's a view of the controversial Pleiades Cluster. Yellow marks show Hipparcos' distances while green marks show Gaia's. In the left-hand view, looking down from Galactic North, our Sun is off-screen at the top, while the right-hand view shows how they look from our viewpoint. The lower/smaller circle shows where the VLBA measured the cluster to actually be, within a LY. The red and green plus marks indicate the Hip and Gaia distances for Asterope. It's the only one of the stars called the "Seven Sisters" that's included in Gaia DR1.

[eburacum45]

Fantastic!
Now I'm going to have to check all the major stars in Orion's Arm for distance values.

Asterope seems a little closer than the rest of the cluster; I suppose that is natural, since we would probably see the stars on this side a little more clearly. There is a non-trivial amount of gas and dust in this cluster, and some of the stars on the other side might be slightly extinguished.

[vpontin]

Any updates about this?

[selden]

simbad-hipparcos_v114 is now available.

This Addon for Celestia v1.6.1 or later provides an updated binary catalog of 114357 stars from the Hipparcos Catalog. It provides star distances, coordinates, spectral types and visual magnitudes obtained from Simbad, as provided by Gaia DR2 and other recent research.

1. Restore stars_114.dat from this Zip file into Celestia's data directory.
2. Rename your existing stars.dat to something else for safekeeping.
3. Copy or rename stars_114.dat to stars.dat
4. Run Celestia.

For more details, see the readme files included in the Zip.

http://www.classe.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/files/simbad-hipparcos_v114.zip (1.9 MB, expands to 2.2 MB)

[gironde]

starnames.dat is a text file that provides the names of the stars in the various astronomical catalogs according to the Hipparcos number.

In Celestia, can we change the name of the file (also in celestia.cfg) to HIPstarnames.dat and can we create an identical file for Tycho stars (TYCstarnames.dat) and declare it in celestia.cfg

Will it work?

When Celestia users publish exoplanet addons, they use a star as their pass. The name chosen for the star is a personal choice and maybe the planet is already declared with another star name, which creates a duplicate that is not necessarily visible if the coordinates of the 2 stars are not entirely similar.

[john71]

The "real" Gaia stars.dat file would be around 20GB....

[gironde]

The "real" Gaia stars.dat file would be around 20GB....

It will be necessary to wait to have a Cray-1 in a portable!

Seriously, I just want to be content with the stars I have in my addons to have a correspondence table (catalog Tycho).

[LukeCEL]

In Celestia, can we change the name of the file (also in celestia.cfg) to HIPstarnames.dat and can we create an identical file for Tycho stars (TYCstarnames.dat) and declare it in celestia.cfg

Will it work?

I'm guessing it wouldn't. I tried to do a similar thing with the HD catalog index—I have two files, one containing HD numbers for the HIP stars, and another containing HD number for non-HIP, Tycho stars. I used this as the code in celestia.cfg:

Code: Select all

  HDCrossIndex               [ "data/hdxindex.dat"
                               "data/tyc_hdindex.dat" ]

And unfortunately, that didn't work. But luckily, starnames.dat is human-readable and easy to edit. You could probably add the star names in the starnames, by converting the TYC designation to a fake HIP designation (see this for what I mean).

[john71]

gironde, Gaia Sky can handle the data...86 GB.

[gironde]

Thanks, LukeCel. I know the numbering principle for TYC. But is starnames.dat able to support these numbers?

john71 :

gironde, Gaia Sky can handle the data...86 GB.

so it's a Cray-10 that we need! Cray-1 is no longer enough.
I will ask Santa Claus.

We will never have all the DSO in our computers. There are already more than 2000 exo discovered planets.And the discoveries will be exponentially increasing.

[gironde]

In this archive, there are my records for the catalog of HAT-P stars and the ssc for their planets.
I had to sort out starnames.dat, extrasolar.stc, extrasolar.ssc and other addons concerning exoplanets. I have completed the names of the stars as much as possible.

[Fafers_br]

simbad-hipparcos_v114 is now available.

This Addon for Celestia v1.6.1 or later provides an updated binary catalog of 114357 stars from the Hipparcos Catalog. It provides star distances, coordinates, spectral types and visual magnitudes obtained from Simbad, as provided by Gaia DR2 and other recent research.

Superb job, Selden. I'm a big fan of your work.
I don't want to abuse of your time, but is there any chance of creating an alternate version of this addon using the distances according to (Bailer-Jones+, 2018), instead of the simple inversion of parallaxes? According to the paper, the invertion of parallaxes overstimates the distances to the stars, and this effect is more pronounced for small values of parallaxes. There is a Catalogue in VizieR (I/347/gaia2dis) about this. I would do it (supposing it is possible) if I had the skills. But, unfortunatelly, this is not the case.
Again, thanks for your time and effort.

[LukeCEL]

I don't want to abuse of your time, but is there any chance of creating an alternate version of this addon using the distances according to (Bailer-Jones+, 2018), instead of the simple inversion of parallaxes?

I'd also like to see this. However, Bailer-Jones et al. (2018) only has Gaia DR2 designations. You'd have to match it up to the Hipparcos Catalog, which is kind of a pain.

[Lafuente_Astronomy]

Is there a chance the Gaia Catalogue DR2 data will be added to the next version of this star.dat file? This is really interesting indeed

[selden]

The "Simbad" stars.dat uses Gaia DR2 positions whenever possible. (Like DR1, DR2 does not provide positions for the brightest stars: they saturate many pixels of the detectors, making it very difficult to measure their positions. Perhaps a later data release will manage to measure them.)

I currently have no plans to create a 2,000,000 Tycho star database. Simbad limits downloads to 20,000 objects at a time, which would make it rather painful and tedious to download 2,000,000 stars from them. It was bad enough getting the ~120,000 Hipparcos stars. Also, unlike DR1, the Gaia DR2 database interface provides no way to download just the stars of the Tycho catalog.

Sorry.

However, if anyone discovers an easier way to get that information, please let me know.