Star catalogues

The star catalogue used by WinStars is the Gaia Data Release 2 published by the European Space Agency (ESA) in April 2018.

In the software, the catalogue is divided into three parts:

  • The part 1 contains objects of magnitude less than 10. It is the basic catalogue of WinStars.
  • The part 2 covers magnitudes between 10 and 13. This represents more than three million additional stars.
  • Finally, the third part requires an Internet connection to work. The magnitudes go from 13 to 20. This concerns more than one billion additional stars.

Note

Parts 2 and 3 are only accessible with the full WinStars.

Note

Gaia is a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in 2013 and expected to operate until 2022. The spacecraft is designed for astrometry: measuring the positions, distances and motions of stars with unprecedented precision. The mission aims to construct by far the largest and most precise 3D space catalog ever made, totalling approximately 1 billion astronomical objects, mainly stars, but also planets, comets, asteroids and quasars among others. The spacecraft will monitor each of its target objects about 70 times over the first five years of the mission to study the precise position and motion of each target, and will keep doing so. The spacecraft has enough micro-propulsion fuel to operate until about November 2024. As its detectors are not degrading as fast as initially expected, the mission could therefore be extended. The Gaia targets, objects brighter than magnitude 20 in a broad photometric band that covers most of the visual range, represent approximately 1% of the Milky Way population. Additionally, Gaia is expected to detect thousands to tens of thousands of Jupiter-sized exoplanets beyond the Solar System, 500,000 quasars outside our galaxy and tens of thousands of new asteroids and comets within the Solar System.The Gaia mission will create a precise three-dimensional map of astronomical objects throughout the Milky Way and map their motions, which encode the origin and subsequent evolution of the Milky Way. The spectrophotometric measurements will provide the detailed physical properties of all stars observed, characterizing their luminosity, effective temperature, gravity and elemental composition. This massive stellar census will provide the basic observational data to analyze a wide range of important questions related to the origin, structure, and evolutionary history of our galaxy.