space@mit-mc (03/09/85)
From: <bang!crash!bwebster@Nosc>
I've already received speedy replies from Walter Smith, Tim Shimeall,
Tom Wadlow, and Christopher Schmidt. Many, many thanks, guys. Unfortunately,
they were all pointing me at the Yale Catalog of Bright Stars. This is
*not* a good source for nearby stars. Why? Because this catalog lists the
*brightest* stars in the sky, which (with a few exceptions) are not the
nearest. The Bright Stars catalog is heavily biased towards O/B/A/F-class
stars, big bright ones that are usually dozens (if not hundreds) of light
years away. The majority of stars within, say, 30 light years of Sol are
dim, red (M-class) stars, which will never make it on anyone's bright star
list. True, there *is* some overlap--Sirius tends to be right up there--but
very few of the nearby stars make it onto a "bright stars" list. Besides,
from what I can see, the Yale Catalog doesn't have the info there that I am
most interested in: good, common names for the stars. Most of the stars
within 30 ly or so have "real" names (Sigma Draconis, Keid, Wolf 359), or at
least the designation from some major catalog (BD +50, CD -44). The Yale
list as described by the folks above doesn't have any of that.
By the way, I will cheerfully post my program when I'm done with it. I
can continue to tweak for a while, because the program won't be listed in
the BYTE article; instead, it'll be on the BYTENet listings BBS. It's
written in MacAdvantage, a UCSD Pascal compiler that runs under the Finder
and has access to most the Toolbox routines. It shouldn't be terribly hard
to convert it to Lisa Pascal or even one of the many C compilers. It would
be interesting to see what modifications this group might come up with. I've
considered adding proper motion info to the data structure and allowing the
user to move forward and backward in time...but that's not a very high
priority right now.
Once again, my thanks to Walter, Tim, Tom, Christopher, and the other who
I know will send me similar messages about the Yale catalog. Maybe we can
get something decent out of this yet.
..bruce..
Bruce Webster/BYTE Magazine
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