Bright Star Catalogue
Encyclopedia
The Bright Star Catalogue, also known as the Yale Catalogue of Bright Stars or Yale Bright Star Catalogue, is a star catalogue
Star catalogue
A star catalogue, or star catalog, is an astronomical catalogue that lists stars. In astronomy, many stars are referred to simply by catalogue numbers. There are a great many different star catalogues which have been produced for different purposes over the years, and this article covers only some...

 that lists all stars of stellar magnitude 6.5 or brighter, which is roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth. It is currently available online in its 5th edition from several sources. Although the abbreviation for the catalog is BS or YBS, citations of stars indexed in the catalog use HR before the catalog number, after the catalog's 1908 predecessor, the Harvard Revised Photometry Catalogue produced by the Harvard College Observatory
Harvard College Observatory
The Harvard College Observatory is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and was founded in 1839...

. The catalog contains 9110 objects, of which 9096 are stars, 10 are novae
Nova
A nova is a cataclysmic nuclear explosion in a star caused by the accretion of hydrogen on to the surface of a white dwarf star, which ignites and starts nuclear fusion in a runaway manner...

 or supernovae
Supernova
A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...

, and 4 are non-stellar objects; the non-stellar objects are the globular cluster
Globular cluster
A globular cluster is a spherical collection of stars that orbits a galactic core as a satellite. Globular clusters are very tightly bound by gravity, which gives them their spherical shapes and relatively high stellar densities toward their centers. The name of this category of star cluster is...

s 47 Tucanae
47 Tucanae
47 Tucanae or just 47 Tuc is a globular cluster located in the constellation Tucana. It is about 16,700 light years away from Earth, and 120 light years across. It can be seen with the naked eye, with a visual magnitude of 4.0...

 (designated HR 95) and NGC 2808
NGC 2808
NGC 2808 is a globular cluster in the constellation Carina. The cluster belongs to the Milky Way, and is one of our home galaxy's most massive clusters, containing more than a million stars...

 (HR 3671), and the open cluster
Open cluster
An open cluster is a group of up to a few thousand stars that were formed from the same giant molecular cloud and have roughly the same age. More than 1,100 open clusters have been discovered within the Milky Way Galaxy, and many more are thought to exist...

s NGC 2281
NGC 2281
NGC 2281 is an open cluster in Auriga constellation.-References:* * *...

 (HR 2496) and Messier 67
Messier 67
Messier 67 is an open cluster in the constellation of Cancer. M67's Trumpler class is variously given as II 2 r, II 2 m, or II 3 r. It was discovered by Johann Gottfried Koehler in 1779. Age estimates for the cluster range between 3.2 and 5 billion years, with the most recent estimate implying...

(HR 3515).

The catalogue is fixed in number of entries, but its data is maintained, and it is appended with a comments section about the objects that has been steadily enhanced since the first version in 1908. The version of 1991 was the fifth in order, a version that implied a considerable enhancement of the comments section, to a little more than the size of the catalogue itself.

External links


  • Original HR catalogue: — 9110 entries
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
x
OK