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Title:
The star catalogues of Ptolemaios and Ulugh Beg. Machine-readable versions and comparison with the modern Hipparcos Catalogue
Authors:
Verbunt, F.; van Gent, R. H.
Affiliation:
AA(Department of Astrophysics/IMAPP, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9010, 6500 GL, Nijmegen, The Netherlands ; SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Utrecht, The Netherlands), AB(URU-Explokart, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80 115, 3508 TC, Utrecht, The Netherlands )
Publication:
Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 544, id.A31, 34 pp. (A&A Homepage)
Publication Date:
08/2012
Origin:
EDP Sciences
Astronomy Keywords:
astrometry, history and philosophy of astronomy
DOI:
10.1051/0004-6361/201219596
Bibliographic Code:
2012A&A...544A..31V

Abstract

In late antiquity and throughout the middle ages, the positions of stars on the celestial sphere were obtained from the star catalogue of Ptolemaios. A catalogue based on new measurements appeared in 1437, with positions by Ulugh Beg, and magnitudes from the 10th-century astronomer al-Sufi. We provide machine-readable versions of these two star catalogues, based on the editions by Toomer (1998, Ptolemy's Almagest, 2nd edn.) and Knobel (1917, Ulugh Beg's catalogue of stars), and determine their accuracies by comparison with the modern Hipparcos Catalogue. The magnitudes in the catalogues correlate well with modern visual magnitudes; the indication "faint" by Ptolemaios is found to correspond to his magnitudes 5 and 6. Gaussian fits to the error distributions in longitude/latitude give widths sigma ~= 27'/23' in the range |Deltalambda,Deltabeta| < 50' for Ptolemaios and sigma ~= 22'/18' in Ulugh Beg. Fits to the range |Deltalambda,Deltabeta| < 100' gives 10-15% larger widths, showing that the error distributions are broader than Gaussians. The fraction of stars with positions wrong by more than 150' is about 2% for Ptolemaios and 0.1% in Ulugh Beg; the numbers of unidentified stars are 1 in Ptolemaios and 3 in Ulugh Beg. These numbers testify to the excellent quality of both star catalogues (as edited by Toomer and Knobel).

Machine-readable catalogues are only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/544/A31

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