Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star Catalog

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Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star Catalog
Alternative namesSAO

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star Catalog is an astrometric star catalogue, created by Smithsonian Institution, a research institute. It was published by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1966 and contains 258,997 stars. [1] [2] [3] [4] The catalogue was compiled from various previous astrometric catalogues, and contains only stars to about ninth magnitude for which accurate proper motions were known. Names in the SAO catalogue start with the letters SAO, followed by a number. The numbers are assigned following 18 ten-degree bands of declination, with stars sorted by right ascension within each band.

Online version of the SAO Catalog was created by the HEASARC in March 2001 based on ADC/CDS Catalog I/131A, which itself is originally derived from a character-coded machine-readable version of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star Catalog (SAO, SAO Staff 1966) prepared by T.A. Nagy in 1979, and subsequently modified over the next decade or so. [5]

Examples of SAO catalogue entries

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SAO or Sao may refer to:

The PPM Star Catalogue is the successor of the SAO Catalogue. It contains precise positions and proper motions of 378,910 stars on the whole sky in the J2000/FK5 coordinate system. It is designed to represent as closely as possible the IAU (1976) coordinate system on the sky, as defined by the FK5 star catalogue. Thus, the PPM is an extension of the FK5 system to higher star densities and fainter magnitudes.

The Catalog of Stellar Identifications (CSI) is a star catalog which was constructed to facilitate cross-referencing between different star catalogs. It contains designations and basic data for, as of 1983, approximately 440,000 stars, and was created by merging the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star Catalog, the Henry Draper Catalogue, the AGK2/3, the Cape Photographic Catalogue, the Cape Zone Catalogue, the Yale Zone Catalogue, the Cape Catalogue of Faint Stars, and the Boss General Catalogue. It contains stellar coordinates, magnitudes, spectral types, proper motions, and cross-references to designations in the previously mentioned catalogs. It also gives cross-references to many other catalogues, such as the Index Catalogue of Visual Double Stars, which have been linked to the CSI. The CSI eventually became part of the SIMBAD stellar database.

Catalog of 5,268 Standard Stars Based on the Normal System N30 is the 1952 auxiliary star catalogue created by Herbert Rollo Morgan to address proper motion inaccuracies in 19th century observations by converting contemporary catalogues from a mean epoch around 1900 to epoch and equinox 1950.0. However, the positions were derived from more than 70 recent catalogs with epochs of observation between 1917 and 1949. The N30 system is independent from any other astrometric system. Independent proper motions were determined by comparing the 1930 normal positions with the normal positions at the mean epoch, 30 years earlier, in the Albany General Catalogue, corrected by Morgan in 1948. Its primary use is the incorporation of 19th century astronomical data into modern research, and includes Harvard photometric magnitude, Henry Draper (HD) spectral type, and proper motion.

HV 2112 Small Magellanic Cloud star in the constellation Tucana

HV 2112 is a cool luminous variable star in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Until 2018, it was considered to be the most likely candidate for a Thorne–Żytkow object, but it is now thought to be an asymptotic giant branch star.

V915 Scorpii Variable star in the constellation Scorpius

V915 Scorpii is an orange hypergiant variable star in the constellation Scorpius.

References

  1. Star Catalog: Positions and Proper Motions of 258,997 Stars for the Epoch and Equinox of 1950.0, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Staff, Publications of the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., no. 4652, 4 vols., 1966 (reprinted 1971.)
  2. Webpage on the SAO star catalog, B1950
  3. Catalog translated to J2000
  4. Interactive query form of the catalog
  5. "SAO - Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Star Catalog". heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov. Retrieved 2021-10-01.
  6. Millis, R. L.; Wasserman, L. H.; Birch, P. V. (1977). "Detection of rings around Uranus". Nature. 267: 330–331. Bibcode:1977Natur.267..330M. doi:10.1038/267330a0.