stellar catalogues

[captcalhoun]

seriously, WTF? why the hell are there so goddamn many? and they're all so confusing! one star can have three different names that are all just an alphanumeric string!

someone should just name all the stars with beyr-esque names like 'A Eridani' or '22-Eridani' and ditch all this HD6969/CD3378/HR1701/Gliese 007 bullshit.

 

[CaptainDonovin]

This may help for now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_catalogue

 

[captcalhoun]

HELP?!?! no it doesn't help. it makes things WORSE!

how the frak am i supposed to find a star on wikipedia when i only know the HR number and the star's not listed by it's HR number? guess?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

write a star catalogue then.

 

[Jadzia]

I believe the different catalogues are due to various design priorities/ characteristics, in how stars are searched and then classified. eg, only stars who we can determine data accurately, or a catalogue as complete as possible for nearby stars, or whatever is within some degree of visibility listed in order from north to south.

I believe the Tycho catalogue is an attempt to integrate them all. But it doesn't have it's own naming scheme.

The trouble with names like Epsilon-Orion, is that there are only 24 greek letters, and 80-odd constellations, giving a pitiful 2000-ish star names.

Our galaxy has over a billion stars, so it falls short by a long way.

Even if you named every star with a noun from the Oxford English Dictionary, you'd run out of nouns after about 100,000 stars.

You could add greek letters: 2,400,000 stars

and a constellation name: 240,000,000 stars

and a number from 1 to 10 : 2.4 billion.

Then you're not far off

So somewhere would be a star called 6-iota-jockstrap-camelopardalis.

 

[Neopeius]

So somewhere would be a star called 6-iota-jockstrap-camelopardalis.

And Camelopard finally gets his star...

 

[CaptainDonovin]

I did say it 'may' help. I make no guarantees my help will be helpful.

 

[Psion]

write a star catalogue then.

That's both hilariously ironic and explanatory of the problem at the same time!

I wish we had some kind of Karma system here on Trek BBS ... I'd create three new accounts just to digg you up.

 

[Mike Farley]

I believe the different catalogues are due to various design priorities/ characteristics, in how stars are searched and then classified. eg, only stars who we can determine data accurately, or a catalogue as complete as possible for nearby stars, or whatever is within some degree of visibility listed in order from north to south.

I believe the Tycho catalogue is an attempt to integrate them all. But it doesn't have it's own naming scheme.

The trouble with names like Epsilon-Orion, is that there are only 24 greek letters, and 80-odd constellations, giving a pitiful 2000-ish star names.

Our galaxy has over a billion stars, so it falls short by a long way.

Even if you named every star with a noun from the Oxford English Dictionary, you'd run out of nouns after about 100,000 stars.

You could add greek letters: 2,400,000 stars

and a constellation name: 240,000,000 stars

and a number from 1 to 10 : 2.4 billion.

Then you're not far off

So somewhere would be a star called 6-iota-jockstrap-camelopardalis.

If by not far off you mean you have names for a little less than 1% of the stars. Currently the Milky Way is estimated to be home to about 200 billion stars.

 

[Jadzia]

Let's not be pedantic over the numbers...

What I was demonstrating is simply that trying to create a nice naming scheme for the stars isn't really so nice in practice because we'd have to have umpteen words chained together to give sufficient coverage.

Given that, we might as well just have numbered catalogue, except for all but the most the interesting stars... which is more-or-less what we have now.

 

[Tobin_Dax]

HELP?!?! no it doesn't help. it makes things WORSE!

how the frak am i supposed to find a star on wikipedia when i only know the HR number and the star's not listed by it's HR number? guess?

Look it up elsewhere. The SIMBAD database will give you other names for stars you look up. Search for the name you know at this page: http://simbad.harvard.edu/simbad/sim-fid