Astronomical catalog

Catalogs of historical importance

• Azophi's Book of Fixed Stars, published in 964, describes more than a thousand stars in detail and provides the first descriptions of the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud.
• Johann Bayer's Uranometria star atlas was published in 1603 with over 1200 stars. Names are made of Greek letters combined with constellation name, for example Alpha Centauri.
• John Flamsteed's Historia coelestis Britannica star atlas, published in 1725, lists stars using numbers combined with constellation and ordered by right ascension, for example 61 Cygni.
• Messier Catalog – The Messier objects are a set of astronomical objects first listed by French astronomer Charles Messier in 1771. Nebulae and Star Clusters was published in 1781, with objects M1 – M110.
• New General Catalogue compiled in the 1880s by J. L. E. Dreyer, lists objects NGC 0001 – NGC 7840. The NGC is one of the largest historical comprehensive catalogs, as it includes all types of non-stellar deep space objects.
• Henry Draper's Henry Draper Catalogue, published between 1918 and 1924, lists more than 225,000 of the brightest stars, named using HD followed by a 6-digit number.
• Sir Patrick Moore compiled the Caldwell catalogue in 1995 to complement the Messier catalog, listing 109 bright star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies named C1 to C109. This is a list of deep-sky objects of interest to amateur astronomy and not a catalog in the professional science sense. Other deep-sky observing lists for amateur astronomers predated it.