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Star Catalogs

Starplot has two available star catalogs:

big-sky-mag11

981,852 stars from Hipparcos, Tycho-1, and Tycho-2

This is an abridged version of the full Big Sky Catalog and is bundled with Starplot. It's the default catalog used when plotting stars. It contains all stars from Big Sky with a limiting magnitude of 11.

big-sky

2,557,500 stars from Hipparcos, Tycho-1, and Tycho-2

This is the full Big Sky catalog and will be downloaded when you first reference it.

This catalog is very large (approx 100 MB), so it's not built-in to Starplot. When you plot stars and specify this catalog, the catalog will be downloaded from the Big Sky GitHub repository and saved to Starplot's data library directory. You can override this download path with the environment variable STARPLOT_DOWNLOAD_PATH

Coming Soon

Support for custom star catalogs, including the full Gaia catalog!

Using Star Catalogs

When plotting stars, you can specify which catalog to use:

p.stars(
    where=[_.magnitude < 12],
    catalog="big-sky",          # <--- use the full Big Sky catalog
)

You can also specify the catalog when looking up stars:

# get a single star
sirius = Star.get(name="Sirius", catalog="big-sky")

# get stars dimmer than magnitude 11
dim_stars = Star.find(where=[_.magnitude > 11], catalog="big-sky")