Who made the first star chart or catalogue? There is little doubt that Eudoxus (B. C. 200) was the first to set down the positions of all the brighter stars on a celestial globe, and he did this from observations with a gnomon and an armillary sphere. Later Hipparchus (B. C. 130) constructed the first known catalogue of stars, so that astronomers of a later day might discover what changes are in progress among the stars, either in their relative positions or caused by old stars disappearing or new stars appearing at times in the heavens. Hipparchus was an accurate observer, and he discovered an apparent and perpetual shifting of the vernal equinox westward, by which the right ascensions of the stars are all the time increasing. He determined the amount of it pretty accurately, too. His catalogue contained 1,080 stars, and is printed in the "Almagest" of Ptolemy.
Centuries elapsed before a second star catalogue was made, by Ulugh-Beg, an Arabian astronomer, A. D. 1420, who was a son of Tamerlane, the Tartar monarch of Samarcand, where the observations for the catalogue were made. The stars were mainly those of Ptolemy, and much the same stars were reobserved by Tycho Brahe (A. D. 1580) with his greatly improved instruments, thus forming the [third and last star catalogue of importance before the invention of the telescope.
From the end of the seventeenth century onward, the application of the telescope to all the types of instruments for making observations of star places has increased the accuracy many-fold. The entire heavens has been covered by Argelander in the northern hemisphere, and Gould in the southern—over 700,000 stars in all. Many government observatories are still at work cataloguing the stars. The Carnegie Institution of Washington maintains a department of astrometry under Boss of Albany, which has already issued a preliminary catalogue of more than 6,000 stars, and has a great general catalogue in progress, together with investigations of stellar motions and parallaxes. This catalogue of star positions will include proper motions of stars to the seventh magnitude.
In 1887 on proposal of the late Sir David Gill, an international congress of astronomers met at Paris and arranged for the construction of a photographic chart of the entire heavens, allotting the work to eighteen observatories, equipped with photographic telescopes essentially alike. The total number of plates exceeds 25,000. Stars of the fourteenth magnitude are recorded, but only those including the eleventh magnitude will be catalogued, perhaps 2,000,000 in all. The expense of this comprehensive map of the stars has already exceeded $2,000,000, and the work is now nearly complete. Turner of Oxford has conducted many special investigations that have greatly enhanced the progress of this international enterprise.
Other great photographic star charts have been carried through by the Harvard Observatory, with [302] the annex at Arequipa, Peru, employing the Bruce photographic telescope, a doublet with 24-inch lenses; also Kapteyn of Groningen has catalogued about 300,000 stars on plates taken at Cape Town. Charting and cataloguing the stars, both visually and photographically, is a work that will never be entirely finished. Improvements in processes will be such that it can be better done in the future than it is now, and the detection of changes in the fainter stars and investigation of their motions will necessitate repetition of the entire work from century to century.
The origin of the names of individual stars is a question of much interest. The constellation figures form the basis of the method, and the earliest names were given according to location in the especial figure; as for instance, Cor Scorpii, the heart of the Scorpion, later known as Antares or Alpha Scorpii. The Arabians adopted many star names from the Greeks, and gave about a hundred special names to other stars. Some of these are in common use to-day, by navigators, observers of meteors and of variable stars. Sirius, Vega, Arcturus, and a few other first magnitude stars, are instances.
But this method is quite insufficient for the fainter stars whose numbers increase so rapidly. Bayer, a contemporary of Galileo, originated our present system, which also employs the names of the constellations, the Latin genitive in each case, prefixed by the small letters of the Greek alphabet, from alpha to omega, in order of decreasing brightness; and followed by the Roman letters when the Greek alphabet is exhausted.
If there were still stars left in a constellation unnamed, numbers were used, first by Flamsteed, Astronomer Royal; and numbers in the order of right ascension in various catalogues are used to designate hundreds of other stars. The vast bulk of the stars are, however, nameless; but about one million are identifiable by their positions (right ascension and declination) on the celestial sphere.
