A Review of Geodetic Astronomy Star Catalogs

Star catalog containing thousands to hundreds of millions of stars in different sizes are used in different applications as an important database. Star catalogs’ data are collected by satellites or ground-based telescopes and typically include estimation of the stars’ positions (right ascension and declination) with positional accuracies, the magnitude of each star in the photometric bands, proper motion, photometry data, the stellar parallaxes, etc. In this study, a list of widely used or well-known catalogs for astronomical data is introduced and their properties such as the number of stars, positional accuracy, and range of stellar magnitudes have been compared. Moreover, some of the concepts and terms used in astronomy are presented in this study. Base on the results, Hipparcos catalog is a comprehensive database that includes all of stars’ information for most astronomical applications.