Quote:
Originally Posted by acrosome
OK, I'm going through the RECONS list of the 100 nearest stellar systems and is it just me or is Wolf 359 not in the Hipparcos dataset? Googling around, it doesn't seem to have a Hipparcos number. And when I search for various identifiers that I do have (Wolf 359, CN Leonis, GJ 406, distance in parsec) in the XHIP dataset I get nothing. That would kind of undermine my trust.
Annoying, considering that it's the third closest system to ours, and thus often looms large in fiction. Heck, even Star Trek's Federation had The Battle of Wolf 359 versus the Borg.
EDIT-- Hmmm, GJ 65 (BL and UV Ceti) and GL 905 are also missing. I suspect that I'm going to find several missing near stars.
Which measurements should I consider more accurate? XHIP or RECONS? Both date from 2012, but I think XHIP was just a re-hashing of older data, whereas RECONS claims newer, more accurate data. |
The Hipparcos catalog by design only has stars brighter than the Hipparcos satellite limit, which was a V-band magnitude of 12.4. So stars like Wolf 359 (V = 13.5) are simply too faint to make the cutoff. [I'm assuming you know how magnitudes work, but in case not: larger numbers = fainter.]
RECONS is, as I understand it, an ongoing project making new (ground-based) observations; the most recent publications are from this year. So you're probably better off using that, since it will be more complete for the really faint stars.