A History Of Cataloging The Heavens: The International Astronomical Union's New Star Catalog

Although the IAU has attempted to provide a brief history of the cataloguing of the stars on their website as an accompaniement to the new catalog, the association begins with the western astronomers of the European Renaissance; crediting Johann Bayer's Uranometria atlas of 1603 as the first such popular catalog. This in fact omits the pivotal contributions of a number of medieval scholars to the information science of cataloguing the stars. This manuscript is from the Library of Congress collection, produced ca. The earliest known cataloguer (as opposed to just mapping) of the stars in the West is Hipparchos of Nikaia (c.190-126 BCE). He is credited as the inventor of trigonometry, but also began to measure the night sky using instruments like the dioptra (Gr.διόπτρα, a surveying instrument for the stars) and perhaps the armillary astrolabe.