Resolve to resolve

The Washington Double Star Catalogue is fantastic, it really is. And you can grab it for yourself. So, obviously, I did.

Importing it into MySQL myself (after a few tweaks), gives me a total of 128,848 stars. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to how many doubles that is. I must see if it contains systems with more than two stars, as well…

The only downside was it doesn’t list those via constellation, you just get the coordinates. But hey, the internationally-agreed boundaries are available, so it isn’t beyond the wit of man (or me) to cobble together a script that given said coordinates, can place it in a constellation.

Downside no more! Now I have the WDS data broken down by constellation, sorted on magnitude. Which leads me to my next project, whereby I see how far down the list I can actually see the separation. The WDS does come with separation data, but I haven’t added that into my page yet. I probably will, all the same.

So now I await a clear night to choose a constellation and be at it. Others do the Messier list, or the Herschel 400. Me, I’m attempting the WDS 120k 🙂

...or the rival of Mars...

…or the rival of Mars…

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