Parallax accuracy for the stars

[Alexander Wolf]

Hello,
I’m using Stellarium 0.12.0 for scientific works with university students. I find it’s a great software which gives good information on the characteristics of the stars.

But, I think that it’s possible to bring an important improvement on the accuracy of the parallax (the distance) of the stars :

1) In Stellarium, parallax is given based on the Hipparcos Catalogue I/239 from 1997.
Now, there is a new, more accurate catalogue : Hipparcos I/311 published in 2007.
Would it be possible to upgrade Stellarium with the last Hipparcos release ?

2) In addition, parallax is provided as a such, with no indication of the related absolute error. It may be technically possible to extract these data from the Hipparcos catalogue for an implementation within Stellarium. It would be very instructive to display the absolute error after each parallax.

For instance :
For HIP 110991 (delta Cep) :
Stellarium parallax (1997) : 3,32 msa.
Catalogue I/311 (2007) : parallax : 3,77 ± 0,16 msa.

For HIP 34088 (dzeta Gem) :
Stellarium parallax : 2,79 msa.
Catalogue I/311 (2007) : parallax : 2,37 ± 0,30 msa.

Hoping someone will add these new information for all the stars…

Best regards

[Alexander Wolf (alexwolf)]

Copy on Github: https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium/issues/87

[gzotti (georg-zotti)]

Set to invalid here because it will be handled now via Github.