An accessible, Creative-Commons-licenced, documented, and referenced dataset of constellations: most with line figures (or connect-the-dot figures) rather than only star groups. The stars are identified by SIMBAD ids, which are both human- and machine-readable (usually latinised Bayer ids). The scholarly sources are in file sources.bib.
The constellations were documented in sky cultures (traditional astronomies, from tribes to empires) across the world and through time. The data includes culture metadata and scholarly sources. The constellations are annotated with names, text on the degree of certainty in its identification, a description (usually a summary of practical usage or mythological themes for that constellation), the semantics of the constellation (derived from the description and name), and pointers to any variant or related constellations. The sky charts (polar, with stars plotted up to magnitude 6.0, for either one or both hemispheres as per the extent of the data) show the lined constellations per culture. Most constellations have line figures. The data also includes some constellations for which only the IAU sky region was identified but not the stars (these have the "IAU" but not the "lines" field), star clusters (such as the Pleiades), and native names for the Milky Way, planets, and individual stars.
The .json format is compatible with that of the Stellarium app and Web versions, such that the data can be reused there.
(Work in progress.)
Analyses of this data:
- Doina Bucur (2022) The network signature of constellation line figures. PLOS ONE 17(7): e0272270. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272270. Also a preprint, arXiv:2110.12329, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12329.
- Doina Bucur (2023). The semantics of constellation line figures. Preprint, arXiv:2306.17573, available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17573.
The map of the 82 sky cultures is below. The .json format currently has 40 (this number is growing). The number in parentheses counts constellations with line figures, but the data contains many other unlined star groups, and names for stars and other sky objects.
