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( Star catalogue)
A star catalogue, or star catalog, is an astronomical catalog that lists stars. In astronomy, many stars are referred to simply by catalogue numbers. There are a great many different star catalogues which have been produced for different purposes over the years, and this article covers only some of the more frequently quoted ones. Most of the recent catalogues are available in electronic format and can be freely downloaded from NASA's Astronomical Data Center and other places (see links at end). The world's first star catalogue was compiled by Shi Shen and Gan De, both Chinese astronomers in the 4th century BC of the Warring States Period.[1] Shi Shen wrote the Shi Shen astronomy (????, Shi Shen tienwen), while Gan De wrote the Astronomic star observation (????, Tianwen xingzhan).[2] In approximately the 3rd century BC, Timocharis of Alexandria and Aristillus created the first star catalogue in the Western world. Over 150 years later, Hipparchus would compare his own star catalogue to Timocharis' and discover that the longitude of the stars had changed over time, which led him to determine the first value of the precession of the equinoxes. In the 2nd century, Ptolemy published a star catalogue as part of his Almagest, which listed 1,022 stars visible from Alexandria. It was the standard star catalogue in the Western and Arab worlds for over a thousand years. Ptolemy's catalogue was based almost entirely on an earlier one by Hipparchus from the 2nd century BC (Newton 1977; Rawlins 1982).
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Star catalogue Subcategories
Star catalogue Articles
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