Catalogs

Hipparcos Catalog

 WCSTools Catalogs
The Hipparcos astrometric catalog, containing 118218 stars, is one of the final products of the Hipparcos mission and was released in June 1997. The Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues were constructed under the responsibility of large scientific teams collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA) from data gathered by the Hipparcos satellite. The Consortia Leaders responsible for the Hipparcos Catalogue were Dr Lennart Lindegren (Lund, Sweden: NDAC) and Professor Jean Kovalevsky (Grasse, France: FAST).

Reference:
The correct reference for the catalogue is as follows:

ESA, 1997, The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues, ESA SP-1200

The Center for Astrophysics version of the catalog is in the local binary format and has had the proper motion added from the epoch of observation, 1991.25, to 2000.0. In addition to the Bt and Vt magnitudes, parallax and parallax error in milliarcseconds are given for each star. As of now, only a searchable RA-sorted version of the catalog is being used, as code has not yet been written to extract stars by their numbers. The numbers increase with right ascension of the star from the Hipparcos Input Catalog. The star's RA order has changed slightly due to better-known proper motions, so the numbers are no longer monotonically increasing.

The Hipparcos Catalogue can be searched by ship (which calls scat) and plotted by skymap.
It is available here in a gzipped file, hipparcos.tar.gz, in Sun/Mac byte order, which can be read with STAR and SCAT on machines with either byte order.

The Hipparcos Input Catalog contains more stars, but the proper motions are not as good and the photometry is not as consistent. hipinput, sorted by ID number, is in J2000 coordinates. It is used by the program scat when the Hipparcos Input Catalog number is known and position, magnitude, and/or spectral type information is desired.

hipinputra is sorted by J2000 right ascension. This version is used for fast searches, at least away from the poles, by the program scat and for plotting by skymap.
Both files are available here in a gzipped file, hipinput.TAR.gz, in Sun/Mac byte order, which can be read with STAR and SCAT on machines with either byte order.

[scat] [ship] [ship examples]