Stars

The simulation shows 8500 stars in their actual location. The stars were taken from the bright star catalog revision 5 as published by Dorrit Hoffleit, Department of Astronomy, Yale University and Wayne H. Warren Jr., ST Systems Corporation, National Space Science Data Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

The following paragraph was taken from the catalog's documentation and describes the catalog in more detail.

The Bright Star Catalogue (BSC) is widely used as a source of basic astronomical and astrophysical data for stars brighter than magnitude 6.5. The catalog contains the identifications of included stars in several other widely-used catalogs, double- and multiple-star identifications, indication of variability and variable-star identifiers, equatorial positions for B1900.0 and J2000.0, galactic coordinates, UBVRI photoelectric photometric data when they exist, spectral types on the Morgan-Keenan (MK) classification system, proper motions (J2000.0), parallax, radial- and rotational-velocity data, and multiple-star information (number of components, separation, and magnitude differences) for known non-single stars. In addition to the data file, there is an extensive remarks file that gives more detailed information on individual entries. This information includes star names, colors, spectra, variability details, binary characteristics, radial and rotational velocities for companion stars, duplicity information, dynamical parallaxes, stellar dimensions (radii and diameters), polarization, and membership in stellar groups and clusters. The existence of remarks is flagged in the main data file.

The catalog was used only for star positions and brightness data. Stars used by the shuttle for navigation are shown in red for easy identification. The following table lists the navigation stars and targets that is used by the Universal Pointing program in the GPC.

Navigation Stars and Targets