The star catalogue of Hevelius

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.