StarPlot: Star Data

Download data sets for StarPlot here. These are easy to install; just unzip and untar the file, cd to the resulting directory, and follow the directions in the INSTALL file. Read the COPYING file included with each data set for copyright information before doing so.

The version number of each data set corresponds to the version number of StarPlot at the last time the data set was edited. Note that data sets are not guaranteed to be backwards-compatible with older versions of StarPlot. For instance, the version of the Gliese data set for StarPlot 0.93 should work with version 0.95 of StarPlot, but the reverse may not be true.

The following two data sets are probably sufficient for most people.

• Third Catalogue of Nearby Stars, Gliese, 1991:
  For StarPlot 0.95 [229k] | For StarPlot 0.93 [232k]

  Contains records for 3803 stars within 25 parsecs of Earth.

• Yale Bright Star Catalog, 5th Rev. Ed., Hoffleit, 1991:
  For StarPlot 0.95 [743k] | For StarPlot 0.93 [745k]

  Contains records for 9096 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 6.5. (However, roughly 1000 of these records are unsuitable for conversion to StarPlot format.)

• If you run Debian, you can get packages for these data sets directly from Debian's repositories. The packages are named gliese and yale respectively (note that they are in the "non-free" archive). If you are running Debian Etch, Lenny or Sid, be sure to also install the new stardata-common package that provides "hooks" for StarPlot-formatted versions of these catalogs to be generated automatically and installed into /usr/share/starplot.
• If you run Fedora (version 7 or newer), you can get packages for these data sets directly from Fedora's repositories. The packages are named starplot-gliese3 and starplot-yale5. If you already have the starplot package installed, StarPlot-formatted versions of these catalogs will be generated automatically and installed into /usr/share/starplot.

The following catalog contains data from the Hipparcos mission, and therefore generally has more accurate star positions than the above two. However, it is also huge and will make StarPlot rather slow. You have been warned.

• SKYMAP SKY2000 Master Catalog, version 4, Myers et al, 2002:
  For StarPlot 0.95 [302k] | For StarPlot 0.93 [302k]

  Since my disk quota is fairly small, this download contains only the specification files. You will also need to get the twenty-four sky*.dat.??.gz files available here or here (total download 28.5M).

  The catalog contains records for 300 000 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 8.0. (About 57% of these records are unsuitable for StarPlot conversion because they contain insufficient information for starconvert to determine an accurate distance to those stars.)

User contributed catalogs for StarPlot:

• Stars with Planets catalog [34k], contributed by Vince Barwinski: a catalog of 358 nearby stars believed to have planets. This file is in StarPlot-native format so you do not need to run starpkg or starconvert on it. The data come from the site Interactive Extra-solar Planets Catalog as of September 16th, 2010.

  A version of this catalog is also available as a Fedora package, starplot-contrib.

• Previous major revisions of the catalog are also available:

  Fifth revision [28k] included 252 stars with exoplanets. Most of the data are from the site Who discovered that planet?, as of Nov. 8, 2008. Data for Fomalhaut b were obtained from here and the Wiki entry.

  Fourth revision [22k] from Vince Barwinski includes 187 stars with exoplanets.

  Third revision [19k] from Vince Barwinski includes 160 stars with exoplanets.

  Second revision [18k] from Vince Barwinski includes 152 stars with planets. Data for all but one were obtained from the web site linked above on July 18, 2006.

  Original version [6.5k] was contributed by Mauro Barbieri: a catalog of 58 nearby stars believed to have planets. This version is not in StarPlot-native format so use of starpkg will be necessary to use it. Works with StarPlot 0.93 and higher.

Another good source of stellar data files is the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center (CDS): http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/CDS.html. You will have to write a specification file in order to use the starconvert utility to put these files into StarPlot's data file format. See the file data/example.spec in the StarPlot source tree, or any of the *.spec files in the data packages above, for examples.

A Note on Copyright

Unlike the StarPlot source code, these data files are not all licensed under the GNU GPL. Therefore the StarPlot-readable data files which the starconvert program generates from the original data files may not be freely distributed. Please read the COPYING file included with each data set for more information.

---

Home