The Star Catalogue of Hevelius

TL;DR

This paper provides a digital version of Hevelius's 1690 star catalogue, evaluates its positional and magnitude accuracy against modern data, and compares it with Brahe's earlier catalogue, highlighting its reliability and historical significance.

Contribution

It offers a machine-readable version of Hevelius's catalogue and analyzes its accuracy using modern Hipparcos data, comparing it with Brahe's catalogue.

Findings

Hevelius's magnitudes correlate well with modern values.

Position accuracy is comparable to Brahe's, with sigma=2 arcmin.

Less than 2% of stars have errors larger than 1 degree.

Abstract

The catalogue by Johannes Hevelius with the positions and magnitudes of 1564 entries was published by his wife Elisabeth Koopman in 1690. We provide a machine-readable version of the catalogue, and briefly discuss its accuracy on the basis of comparison with data from the modern Hipparcos Catalogue. We compare our results with an earlier analysis by Rybka (1984), finding good overall agreement. The magnitudes given by Hevelius correlate well with modern values. The accuracy of his position measurements is similar to that of Brahe, with sigma=2 arcmin for with more errors larger than 5 arcmin than expected for a Gaussian distribution. The position accuracy decreases slowly with magnitude. The fraction of stars with position errors larger than a degree is 1.5 per cent, rather smaller than the fraction of 5 per cent in the star catalogue of Brahe.