iau-starnames

This code will download and parse official star names published by the IAU Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) from IAU-CSN

I am not affiliated with nor endorsed by the IAU. This work is part of my master's dissertation experiments with star trackers.

The IAU Catalog of Star Names is not a "full" star catalog, it's intent is to list the official names for the stars it contains and uniquely identify those stars. For more complete catalogs, try the full Hipparcos catalogue (117955 stars, complete to magnitude 7.3[reference needed], does not have star names) or the smaller Bright Star Catalogue (9110 stars, complete to magnitude 6.5[reference needed], has star names). If you need a larger dataset, the Gaia Mission has published the Gaia Data Release 2 downloadable here with 1,692,919,135 light sources, and features the distance and motion parameters of more than 1 billion stars. Update: Gaia Data Release 3 is now available.

How to use

To update the catalog, remove catalog_data/IAU-CSN.txt and run download.py (python 3 is required). This will download the latest catalog_data/IAU-CSN.txt file from the IAU and rebuild the other files in the folder.

download.py will produce a warning and will not download a newer IAU-CSN.txt file if the old one is present.

The following files will be rebuilt:

• catalog_data/IAU-CSN.txt will be downloaded from IAU-CSN
• catalog_data/IAU-CSN.json is the parsed version of the catalog in json format.
• catalog_data/IAU-CSN.csv is the parsed version of the catalog in a tab separated format (TSV). The CSV extension is used for compatibility.
• catalog_data/IAU-CSN_normalized.txt is a cleaner, aligned version of the original file.

The IAU-CSN.txt original file is mirrored in this repository to keep a version history.

Catalog description

The Catalog of Star Names (IAU-CSN) is produced by the IAU Working Group on Star Names. It is published online as bulletins and as a plain text file which can be downloaded at http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/WGSN/IAU-CSN.txt.

Catalog Preamble

The text file contains a preamble explaining it's contents and displays fixed-width columns with the attributes: Name, Designation, RA(J2000), Dec(J2000), Vmag, ID, Con, #, WDS_J, HIP#, HD# and Approved. See the preamble for further information.

Identifier prefixes

Used in the IAU-CSN:

• HR - Bright Star Catalogue (Harvard Revised Photometry)
• HIP - Hipparcos catalogue
• HD - Henry Draper Catalogue
• GJ, GL, WO - Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars
• PSR - Pulsating Source of Radio - Pulsar
• WDS_J - The Washington Double Star Catalog

Other catalogs:

• BD - Bonner Durchmusterung The BD is supplemented by the Cordoba Durchmusterung (CD) and the Cape Durchmusterung for stars in the southern hemisphere.
• GC - General Catalogue of Boss
• SAO - Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Catalogue
• PPM - Positions and Proper Motions Catalogue

For the wikipedia list of prefixes, see here

Updates

The IAU_CSN.txt data file in this repository was last synced with the IAU on 2022-07-04.

The IAU_CSN_normalized.txt file is intended to make machine parsing easier. Ideally this should be the same as the original file, but there have been points in time in which the original file contained alignment errors.

• As of 2017-10-28, the IAU file format has changed, and the only difference to the normalized version is the fixing of the entry for Miaplacidus.
• As of 2017-10-31, Miaplacidus entry was fixed. There is no difference between the normalized and the original versions.
• As of 2017-11-28, the differences between the normalized file and the original are limited to blank spaces.
• As of 2018-08-30, 4 star records were updated and 15 more have been added. Polaris Australis HR 7228 had the '-' fields replaced with '_' for some reason. Normalization will replace every '_' with '-'.
• As of 2018-10-11, a greek letter identifier column has been added and 6 star records have been added. More '_' occurrences that have been all replaced with '-'.
• As of 2020-10-26 two columns were added: the "bnd", "Name/Diacritics"; "Name" was renamed to "Name/ASCII", "Vmag" was renamed to mag, and "Approved" was renamed to "Date". The second "ID" column is called "ID/Diacritics" in this code now. I have changed the way ""s are treated - it is actually a better character than "-" to denote an empty data field. I believe the IAU catalog has two minor errors at this time: Elgafar star greek id uses a captial greek letter "phi" instead of a lowercase one and Mebsuta star is missing a "" in column 7.
• As of 2022-07-04, 2 records added, 3 records updated. One of the updates was the renaming of Unurgunite to Nganurganity. A "$" (probably a typo) was introduced in the header. I have also changed the escaped unicode to plain unicode in the .json output.

Resources

• Online IAU Catalog of Star Names with historical context on how stars are named.

• Latest plain text catalog: IAU-CSN

• IAU Working Group on Star Names Website.

• Hipparcos catalogue (117955 stars, does not have star names)

• Bright Star Catalogue (9110 stars, has star names)

• Gaia Data Release 2 (1,692,919,135 light sources)

• Washington Visual Double Star Catalog, direct USNO link (constantly updated, more than 140000 entries)

License

This code is released under the MIT license.

The catalog mirrored in this repository is distributed by the IAU under the Creative Commons Attribution (i.e. free to use in all perpetuity, world-wide, as long as the source is mentioned). Direct link: IAU-CSN