d3-celestial: star, constellation-line and star-name data files
Olaf Frohn. , 2015.
- Verification
- Tier A Author, title, publisher and year checked against a publisher record, catalogue or scan. Entries may cite this.
- Reliability
- primary-source
- Kind
- dataset
- Identifiers
- Accessed
- 2026-07-30
Source of both datasets behind the sky view: data/stars.6.json and data/stars.8.json (J2000 equatorial positions, Hipparcos number, V magnitude and B-V colour index, converted from VizieR V/137D, the XHIP compilation, see anderson-francis-2012-xhip), data/starnames.json (proper name, Bayer and Flamsteed designations, compiled from VizieR IV/27A and IV/22), and data/constellations.lines.json (the 88-figure stick-figure line data, per the repository's own readme.md "Sources" section drawn from the IAU's public constellation charts with line modifications by Frohn himself). The whole repository, including the data/ directory, is released under the 3-clause BSD licence in its root LICENSE file (copyright 2015 Olaf Frohn). This was verified by fetching that file directly. A BSD licence permits redistribution of a modified, compacted form with the copyright notice retained, which this project does in scripts/build-sky.ts and public/sky/manifest.json. Data fetched at the master branch commit 6d5e96655e0f1fe70b1eb7cf9be0eed5290e1458 (the most recent commit touching data/stars.6.json, dated 2020-02-29). Rejected on licensing grounds before this source was chosen: the HYG Database (astronexus/HYG-Database) and the Stellarium western sky culture (Stellarium/stellarium-skycultures). The HYG Database's LICENSE file is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, a copyleft term this non-share-alike site cannot take on for a data file it compacts and redistributes. For the Stellarium sky culture, the per-culture index.json carries no license field of its own, the repository root license is the copyleft AGPL-3.0, and the README only recommends, without requiring, CC BY-SA for individual cultures' content, which leaves the actual terms for that specific file unstated.
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What it is cited for
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- Three Reference Frames
- The constellation line figures the sky view draws, and the dataset's own record that its compiler modified some of them: the IAU fixed boundaries, never figures.