Catalog Families

The positional catalogues that pin down where the stars are — from Argelander's pre-photographic Bonner Durchmusterung and the Smithsonian's SAO catalogue to the space-based precision of Hipparcos, Tycho-2, and Gaia.

The catalogues of bright deep-sky showpieces made for the eye and the small telescope — Charles Messier's eighteenth-century list of 'objects to avoid' when comet-hunting, and Patrick Moore's later Caldwell Catalogue that gathers the bright objects Messier passed over.

The New General Catalogue and its two Index Catalogue supplements, compiled by J. L. E. Dreyer from the visual discoveries of the Herschels and their successors. Together the NGC and IC number nearly 13,000 galaxies, clusters, and nebulae and remain the most widely used designations for deep-sky objects.

The great reference catalogues of galaxies — the Uppsala General Catalogue's size-selected northern galaxies and the Principal Galaxies Catalogue that underpins the HyperLEDA database, providing standard identifiers for galaxies far beyond those with common names.

The catalogues that map the Sun's immediate neighbourhood — Gliese's census of stars within about 25 parsecs, and the high-proper-motion catalogues of Luyten (LHS) and Max Wolf, whose fast-moving stars are usually the closest ones.

The specialist catalogues of interstellar clouds — Sharpless's HII regions glowing around young stars, Barnard's dark dust clouds silhouetted against the Milky Way, and Abell's large, faint planetary nebulae. Together they map the gas and dust between the stars.

The catalogues of stars that change and stars that come in pairs — the General Catalogue of Variable Stars, which names and classifies variables, and the Washington Double Star Catalog, the master reference for binary and multiple systems.