Fast Determination of Constellation Membership

TL;DR

This paper introduces a binary tree-based method to quickly determine the constellation membership of any sky coordinate by tessellating the celestial sphere into rectangles, simplifying the complex boundary system.

Contribution

It presents a novel binary tree decomposition approach for rapid constellation membership determination, improving computational efficiency over previous methods.

Findings

Enables fast constellation identification for arbitrary sky coordinates.

Reduces computational complexity in celestial mapping tasks.

Provides a practical tessellation of the celestial sphere into rectangles.

Abstract

The 88 constellations as defined by the IAU segment the sky into regions, separated by an intricate set of boundaries. A binary tree decomposition of this landscape is given which tessellates the celestial sphere into rectangles. This allows a fast determination of the constellation membership of any given sky coordinate.