Celestial Data

This project provides datasets of celestial objects for the J2000 epoch in GeoJSON and GeoPackage formats.

The source files come from d3-celestial and are distributed under the BSD 3-Clause license. They were processed with R and sf to repair and validate geometries. The conversion preserves the source attributes where possible, but some invalid constellation lines were removed.

Coordinates describe the J2000 celestial reference, encoded as longitude-like and latitude-like angles for GIS software. Assigning EPSG:4326 is a storage convention here: these are not terrestrial WGS84 locations. J2000 does not indicate when the files were downloaded or updated, and these static catalogs do not calculate the current sky for an observer.

Geometry validation was performed with GEOS 3.9.3. It checks geometric validity, not the astronomical accuracy or completeness of the source catalogs.

Distribution

The same files are available through the website, GitHub and jsDelivr. These URLs follow the main branch and may differ from an archived release identified by the collection DOI.

These URLs point to the minified Milky Way dataset.

<!-- From GitHub -->
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dieghernan/celestial_data/main/data/mw.min.geojson

<!-- From the Website -->
https://dieghernan.github.io/celestial_data/data/mw.min.geojson

<!-- From jsDelivr -->
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/dieghernan/celestial_data@main/data/mw.min.geojson

Data

Browse 19 geographic datasets and six complementary CSV tables. Each dataset page provides direct downloads, file sizes and metadata.

Browse datasets and downloads Preview selected datasets

GeoJSON and GeoPackage contain spatial features. Minified GeoJSON removes whitespace without simplifying geometries. The CSV files contain attributes and names without geometry.

Citation

Please cite these datasets as:

Frohn, O., & Hernangómez, D. (2023). Celestial Data [Data set]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7561601

The DOI above identifies the collection across releases. To cite the archived v1.0.1 release specifically, use https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7568546. Downloads from the main branch may differ from that release.

A BibTeX entry:

@misc{frohnhernangomez:2023,
    title        = {Celestial Data},
    author       = {Olaf Frohn and Diego Hernangómez},
    year         = 2023,
    doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.7561601},
    url          = {https://dieghernan.github.io/celestial_data/},
}

References