The file ConstellationLines.dat contains lists of stars from the Bright Star Catalogue (BSC, 5th Revised Ed.; Preliminary Version, 1991) that can be connected in order to draw the basic constellations of our night sky. The file was originally created in early 2005, for what was to become the Dutch/Flemish popular-astronomy website hemel.waarnemen.com. Four static example maps can be found on that website (with labels in Dutch): North pole, Equator ~0h RA, Equator ~12h RA, South pole.
The data files are in plain text.
Each data line in the file shows a list of space-separated values that can be used to draw a single line on the map (usually a single constellation). To keep the number of lines limited (most constellations use up a single line in the file), sometimes a drawn line retraces itself without ‘taking the pen off the map’. Note that some constellations (e.g. Cru) cannot be drawn using only one line, and have multiple data lines in this file.
- Latin constellation abbreviation (
%3s); - number of stars to draw lines between = number of numbers following on this line (
%2d); - (rest of the columns; max 31) BSC numbers for those stars (1-9110) (
%4deach).
The data are identical to those in ConstellationLines.dat, but the columns are comma-separated rather than
space-separated, and can be read without formatting statements.
- abr
- Latin constellation abbreviation;
- nr
- number of stars to draw lines between = number of numbers following on this line;
- sXX
- BSC numbers for those stars (1-9110; rest of the columns: XX=01-31); empty if unused.
Copyright (c) 2005-2023, Marc van der Sluys, hemel.waarnemen.com.
The data can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
- The Western Constellations, by Eleanor Lutz (2019)
- EXPLORE toolkit (EU Horizon 2020 project, 2023)