Celestial Data

This repository contains several datasets in GeoJSON and GeoPackage format of celestial objects as of J2000 epoch.

The original files were provided on the d3-celestial plugin (Frohn 2015) under BSD 3-Clause. The datasets on this repository consists on the same data provided on d3-celestial plugin processed with the R package sf (Pebesma 2018) to ensure its validity:

• The spatial data objects are bounded to $[-180, -90, 180, 90]$.

• Date is provided on WGS84 - World Geodetic System 1984 (EPSG:4326).

• All geometries valid as per ST_IsValid (GEOS 3.9.3).

Distribution

The data can be accessed from several API endpoints:

<!-- From GitHub -->
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dieghernan/celestial_data/main/data/mw.min.geojson

<!-- From the Website -->
https://dieghernan.github.io/celestial_data/data/mw.min.geojson

<!-- From jsDelivr -->
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/dieghernan/celestial_data@main/data/mw.min.geojson

Citation

Please cite these datasets as:

Frohn O, Hernangómez D (2023). “Celestial Data.” doi:10.5281/zenodo.7561601 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7561601, https://dieghernan.github.io/celestial_data/.

A BibTeX entry:

@misc{frohnhernangomez:2023,
    title        = {Celestial Data},
    author       = {Olaf Frohn and Diego Hernangómez},
    year         = 2023,
    doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.7561601},
    url          = {https://dieghernan.github.io/celestial_data/},
}

Data

Data is provided in GeoJSON (*.geojson) and GeoPackage (*.gpkg) format. Additionally, for GeoJSON formats a minified version (*.min.geojson) is also provided.

The data source can be found on https://github.com/dieghernan/celestial_data/tree/main/data.

See additional details on https://dieghernan.github.io/celestial_data/data

Original data sources

For completion, we add the original data sources cited by Frohn (2015):

• asterisms.*:

  • Saguaro Astronomy Club Asterisms

• constellations.* and constellations.lines.*:

  • IAU Constellation page, name positions and some line modifications by Olaf Frohn, , names in other languages from Wikipedia

• constellations.bounds.*:

  • Davenhall, A. C., and S. K. Leggett. 1989. “Catalogue of Constellation Boundary Data.” http://vizier.cfa.harvard.edu/viz-bin/Cat?VI/49.

• Traditional Chinese Constellations & Stars: constellations.cn.*, constellations.bounds.cn.*, constellations.lines.cn.*, starnames.cn.*:

  • Stellarium skycultures data

• dsos.6.*, dsos.8.^*, dsos.14.*:

  • Saguaro Astronomy Club Database version 8.1

• dsos.bright.*

  • Frohn, Olaf. 2015. “d3-celestial.” https://github.com/ofrohn/d3-celestial/.

• messier.* Messier objects:

  • Messier Objects with Data, H.Frommert/seds.org

• lg.* Local group and Milky Way halo:

  • Frohn, Olaf. 2015. “d3-celestial.” https://github.com/ofrohn/d3-celestial/, from different sources: see blog, pages for complete list.

• stars.6.*, stars.8.^*, stars.14.*:

  • Anderson, E., and Ch. Francis. 2012. “XHIP: An Extended Hipparcos Compilation.” Astronomy Letters 38 (5): 331–46. https://doi.org/10.1134/S1063773712050015.

• starnames.* Star names and designations:

  • Kostjuk, N. D. 2002. “VizieR Online Data Catalog: HD-DM-GC-HR-HIP-Bayer-Flamsteed Cross Index.” VizieR Online Data Catalog, IV/27A. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004yCat.4027....0K.

  • Stellarium skycultures data for star name translations

References