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Hoshi Stars星

The stars you can see without a telescope, with names, colours and distances; the 88 constellations with their lines and boundaries; the Messier objects; and seven map projections to draw them on.

Hoshi is the Japanese word 星 for a star. About the name

Contents

Reference · Sky cultures: the figure and culture types, and your own culture

Asterismtype

One figure of a sky culture: its names, its reading and the stars it joins, as Bright Star Catalogue (HR) numbers. figures(culture) and figureOf(text, culture) turn it into stars and lines.

Import it

import type { Asterism } from "@johnmorrisdotca/hoshi-stars/culture";

Definition

interface Asterism {
    readonly id: string;
    readonly name: string;
    readonly names: Readonly<Partial<Record<NameLanguage, string>>>;
    readonly readings: Readonly<{
        ja?: string;
        zh?: string;
    }>;
    readonly aka: readonly string[];
    readonly about: string;
    readonly kind: AsterismKind;
    readonly group: string | undefined;
    readonly partOf?: string;
    readonly missing: number;
    readonly numbers?: Readonly<Record<number, number>>;
    readonly chains: ReadonlyArray<readonly number[]>;
}

Members

NameTypeDescription
idstring

A short ASCII key, stable between releases: the IAU abbreviation for a constellation (Ori), else a lower-case word (hokuto-shichisei, bei3-dou3).

namestring

The name in the culture's own writing: the Latin name (Orion) for a Western constellation, the English name (Big Dipper) for a Western asterism, 昴 for a Japanese one, the Traditional characters (北斗) for a Chinese one.

namesReadonly<Partial<Record<NameLanguage, string>>>

The name in each language the figure has one in.

readingsReadonly<{ ja?: string; zh?: string; }>

How the name is read: ja in hiragana (すばる), zh in pinyin with tone marks (běi dǒu).

akareadonly string[]

Other names it is called by, accepted by find (六連星 for 昴). Empty for most.

aboutstring

A few English words on what it is (the Pleiades, Orion's belt), or an empty string.

kindAsterismKind

Whether it is a constellation, an asterism or a Chinese mansion.

groupstring | undefined

For a Chinese mansion, the quarter of the sky it belongs to (azure-dragon, black-tortoise, white-tiger, vermilion-bird); undefined otherwise.

partOf (optional)string | undefined

For a Chinese asterism, the enclosure (purple-forbidden, supreme-palace, heavenly-market) or the id of the mansion it is part of, where Wikidata states it; absent otherwise.

missingnumber

At least how many of its stars are not held: fainter than visual magnitude 6.0, which the catalogue does not hold, or (for a figure read from a source that names stars by number) not named with a catalogue number in that source, so we cannot tell which. The figure draws only the stars we have. 0 where all are held or none is known to be missing.

numbers (optional)Readonly<Record<number, number>> | undefined

Each held star's number in the figure, by Bright Star Catalogue number, where the culture numbers its stars: the Chinese sky's names do (角宿一 is star 1 of 角宿). { 5056: 1, 5107: 2 } for 角宿; absent where the culture does not number them, and a star the source gives no number has none. The numbers are the source's, repeats and all: in the Chinese sky 斗宿 has two stars numbered 1 and 天園 two numbered 4 (Wikidata names them so), and 三台's pairs share theirs by design; the stars known by a proper name (the Northern Dipper's, 天狼) are numbered by their place in the package's list. A mansion's star 1 is its determinative star (距星) where one star has that number.

chainsreadonly (readonly number[])[]

The stars as HR numbers: chains, each a run of stars joined one to the next; a chain of one is a single star.

Examples

import { chinese } from "@johnmorrisdotca/hoshi-stars/cultures/chinese";

const dipper = chinese.find("北斗")!;
console.log(dipper.name, dipper.readings.zh, dipper.chains.length);
// each star's number in the asterism: 角宿一 (Spica, HR 5056) is star 1
console.log(chinese.find("角宿")!.numbers);
北斗 běi dǒu 1
{ '5056': 1, '5107': 2 }

What it prints (run when this page was built)

View sourceEdit on GitHubMade from the source of @johnmorrisdotca/hoshi-stars 0.47.0.