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Loading contentThe great catalogues of the sky — Messier, NGC, and more.
Two catalogues compiled by George Abell. The 1958 catalogue of rich clusters of galaxies — later extended southward — became the standard reference for galaxy clusters, listing thousands of the densest concentrations in the Universe. Separately, Abell catalogued 86 large, faint planetary nebulae. Objects carry an 'Abell' number in both.
The star catalogue embedded in Ptolemy's Almagest, listing over a thousand stars in 48 constellations with positions and magnitudes. It built on Hipparchus's earlier catalogue and defined the classical sky for centuries.
The first systematic catalogue of dark nebulae, compiled by Edward Emerson Barnard from his pioneering photographs of the Milky Way. The 1919 list of 182 objects was later extended to 370; each 'B' object is a cloud of interstellar dust silhouetted against the star fields behind it, such as B33, the Horsehead Nebula.
The great pre-photographic survey of the northern sky, carried out under Friedrich Argelander at Bonn and published from 1863. It recorded positions and magnitudes for about 325,000 stars to roughly ninth magnitude — the most comprehensive star catalogue of its era — and its 'BD' designations remain in use for naked-eye and telescopic stars today.
The catalogues from ESA's Gaia mission, mapping the positions, distances, motions, and brightnesses of nearly two billion stars.
The authoritative catalogue of variable stars, first published in Moscow in 1948 and maintained since at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute. It assigns official variable-star designations and records variability type, period, and amplitude for tens of thousands of stars, serving as the reference for the naming of newly confirmed variables.
The standard catalogue of stars in the immediate solar neighbourhood, begun by Wilhelm Gliese and later extended with Hartmut Jahreiß. It lists the stars known to lie within about 25 parsecs of the Sun, with distances and motions; its 'GJ' (or older 'Gl') numbers are the usual designations for nearby red dwarfs and other close stars.
The system that orders stars by the appearance of their spectra into the temperature sequence O B A F G K M, developed at Harvard under Edward Pickering and brought to its final form by Annie Jump Cannon.
A vast catalogue of stellar spectra produced at Harvard, with classifications largely by Annie Jump Cannon. Named in memory of astrophotography pioneer Henry Draper, it gave the 'HD' designations still used for stars today.
The catalogue produced by ESA's Hipparcos mission, the first space astrometry survey, giving high-precision parallaxes, positions, and magnitudes. It established the modern distance scale of the nearby Galaxy.
A catalogue of 258,997 stars compiled by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, combining earlier positional catalogues to support satellite tracking. Its dense, uniform coverage and widely printed star atlas made 'SAO' numbers a long-standing standard designation for stars down to about ninth magnitude.
A catalogue of HII regions — clouds of ionised hydrogen glowing around hot young stars — compiled by Stewart Sharpless. Its second edition (Sh2, 1959) lists 313 emission nebulae across the northern Milky Way, including many of the sky's great star-forming complexes. Objects carry an 'Sh2' number.
The principal database of double and multiple stars, maintained by the United States Naval Observatory. It gathers positions, separations, position angles, and magnitudes for well over a hundred thousand pairs from centuries of measurements, and its 'WDS' identifiers are the standard reference for binary and multiple systems.
An early catalogue of high-proper-motion stars assembled by Max Wolf, a pioneer of astrophotography, from his survey of moving stars. Its 'Wolf' numbers survive as designations for several well-known nearby stars — most famously Wolf 359, one of the closest stars to the Sun.