Yale Bright Star Catalog

These files contain version 5 of the Yale Bright Star Catalog of 9,110 stars, including B1950 positions, proper motions, magnitudes, and, usually, spectral types in a locally-developed binary format described below. This catalog is more or less complete to V=7.

BSC5 is sorted by increasing ID number, with J2000 coordinates, It is used by the program sbsc (which invokes scat) when the BSC number is known and position, magnitude, and/or spectral type information is desired.

BSC5ra, the RA-sorted version, is used for fast searches by the program sbsc (which invokes scat) and for plotting by skymap.

A gzipped 521,425-byte file containing both files with B1950 coordinates in Sun/Mac byte order is available here as bsc.tar.gz. scat can read these files on machines with either byte order.

BSC5, a 291,548-byte file, is available in PC byte order via HTTP as BSC5.
BSC5ra, a 291,548-byte file, is available in Sun/Alpha byte order via HTTP as BSC5ra.
WCSTools programs can read either byte order on any machine.

Detailed descriptions of the binary header format and binary entry format are available.

An ASCII version with more information for each star is available here:

ybsc5.readme [uncompressed catalog description]
ybsc5.gz [gzip-compressed ASCII catalog]
ybsc5.notes.gz [gzip-compressed catalog notes]

Other online documentation is available at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/star-catalog/bsc5p.html.

Sky Coverage

[WCSTools sbsc]