The star catalogue of Hevelius^*

Machine-readable version and comparison with the modern Hipparcos Catalogue

¹ Astronomical Institute, Utrecht University, PO Box 80 000, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: f.w.m.verbunt@uu.nl
² URU-Explokart, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80 115, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands
³ Institute for the History and Foundations of Science, PO Box 80 000, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands

Received: 6 January 2010
Accepted: 4 February 2010

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 σ = 2´ for longitudes and latitudes, but with more errors >5´ 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%, rather smaller than the fraction of 5% in the star catalogue of Brahe.