- TEAM: Robert Mitchell, Anna Chang, Christopher Dunleavy
- The database will allow users to query the data for nearby stars of high brightness that they could then observe with their telescope (nearby = within 50 parsecs, and bright = magnitude higher than +9.0).
Since cosmological data is so complex, it would require more domain knowledge
for our group to handle, which is why we chose a dataset that an amateur could
navigate without sacrificing a robust set of interesting attributes to query.
Since tabular data is best suited for setting up a database, we decided to
search for catalogs that are not too overwhelming in scope.
The above referenced dataset combines three major catalogs: the Hipparcos Catalog, the Yale Bright Star Catalog (5th ed.), and the Gliese Catalog of Nearby Stars (3rd ed.). This is where its name, ‘HYG’ comes from. The dataset is available as a CSV file, which will help us when we need to begin building/importing into our database.
One of the challenges will be acquiring enough domain knowledge to make meaningful queries. Nevertheless, it is also an appealing feature for our group, since we are all very curious individuals. Another challenge will be the amount of actual records. Luckily, the attributes are very well defined and sensible; therefore, the number of records should not pose too much of a problem so long as we have well elaborated relationships and a good reason to perform queries.
An exciting feature of the dataset is geospatial/coordinate fields, which we may be able to use for visualization. There are two fields that contain location-based data in two specific formats:
- X,Y,Z:
- VX,VY,VZ
Another exciting feature is the possibility of using SQL and the database in conjunction with other kinds of analysis and visualization tools.
Next steps require specification through the diagramming of our entity relationships.