Say which band each star was measured in, whose catalogue it is, and how sure its distance is

The readout named Hipparcos, Yale and Gliese while 378 775 of the 455 608 stars are described by
Gaia DR3, printed one "Magnitude" for G and V alike, and gave every distance to the parsec. The
band cannot be read off the star's source, which records whose position it has: 62 002 stars Gaia
places keep HYG's V and B-V, and the 575 hosts renamed after their planets are Gaia's, in G.

stars-meta.bin gains two byte columns, 14 to 16 bytes a star (6 378 512 to 7 289 728 bytes; gzip
-9 2 804 049 to 3 110 991). One holds the magnitude's band (V 76 555 stars, G 378 744, none 309,
whose magnitude is a stand-in), which colour the colour index is (B-V 75 203, BP-RP 376 703), and
whether the distance is Gaia's parallax. The other holds the distance's relative error as its
square root in 255ths: a step is 0.08 % of distance at 1 %, 0.35 % at 20 %, and 100 % is the top.
encode, decode, BYTES_PER_STAR_META and the build.ts round trip cover both; no workflow reads the
format.

Where the errors come from:
- Gaia rows keep the parallax_error their query already fetched: median 0.3 %, 90th percentile
  1.2 %, at most 20 %, the query's own cut.
- A HYG star at Gaia's distance takes the cross-match's parallax_over_error, and a star merged
  into a Gaia entry keeps that entry's error with its position.
- The 3 067 Hipparcos stars that keep their Hipparcos distance, Rigel, Deneb and Alnilam among
  them, take e_plx from van Leeuwen's 2007 reduction: a new cached query of
  public.hipparcos_newreduction on the ESA archive, whose 117 955 rows HYG's distances invert.
- The archive's stars take sy_disterr1/2 from pscomppars, in a query and cache file of their own
  so the composite rows already cached were not refetched.
- 439 distances have no published error: 357 Gliese rows and 82 archive hosts.

Of the errors, 392 786 are 1 % or less and are not printed; 61 156 print as "117 ± 12 pc" to the
distance's own digits; 1 196 between 20 and 100 %, and 30 past it, print as the range the
parallax gives, since a symmetric error in parallax is a lopsided one in distance.

The star card (measured on the dev server) now reads, for example:
- Rigel: 265 ± 23 pc, V 0.18, B-V -0.03, source HYG.
- Deneb: 433 ± 60 pc.
- Alnilam: "476 pc to 833 pc" (Hipparcos 1.65 ± 0.45 mas).
- Gaia DR3 5612323414549657984: 111 ± 2 pc, G 4.63, BP-RP -0.15, source Gaia DR3.
- Proxima Centauri: 1.30 pc, V 11.01, source "HYG, Gaia DR3 distance".
- TRAPPIST-1: G 15.62, BP-RP 4.90, source Gaia DR3.
- Kepler-186: V 15.14, source NASA Exoplanet Archive.
The neighbourhood's subtitle reads "Gaia DR3 378,775 · HYG 73,556 · NASA Exoplanet Archive
3,277", counted by the catalogue describing each star.

build.ts validateStars now fails a catalogue with more than 1 000 stars without a band (309
today) or without a distance error (439). Dropping G from the Gaia rows gave 379 040 without a
band, and dropping their parallax_error gave 441 216 without an error; both runs failed.

Decoding the catalogue in Node took a median 29 ms before and 24 ms after (nine runs each, within
noise). In the app, five cold boots gave a 654-786 ms long task after the data landed and the
HUD at 1.83-2.07 s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

src/app/shared/astro/star-merge.spec.ts

@@ -157,6 +157,33 @@ describe('mergeStarCatalogues', () => {
     expect(summary.duplicates).toBe(1);
   });
 
+  it("keeps the distance's error with the distance, and the photometry with the description", () => {
+    // Proxima's parallax is 768.07 ± 0.05 mas in Gaia and 768.13 ± 1.04 in Hipparcos: the star is
+    // drawn at Gaia's, so the error it is drawn with is Gaia's, while V 11.01 and B−V 1.81 stay HYG's.
+    const hyg = at(70666, 217.4289, -62.6795, 1.2959, {
+      name: 'Proxima Centauri',
+      magnitude: 11.01,
+      magnitudeBand: 'V',
+      colorIndex: 1.807,
+      colorSystem: 'B-V',
+      distanceError: 0.00135,
+      distanceFromGaia: false
+    });
+    const gaia = at(1000064182, 217.4289, -62.6795, 1.302, {
+      name: 'Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696',
+      magnitude: 8.985,
+      magnitudeBand: 'G',
+      colorIndex: 3.805,
+      colorSystem: 'BP-RP',
+      distanceError: 0.000065,
+      distanceFromGaia: true,
+      source: 'gaia'
+    });
+    const [merged] = mergeStarCatalogues([{ ...HIPPARCOS, stars: [hyg] }, { ...GAIA, stars: [gaia] }]).stars;
+
+    expect(merged).toMatchObject({ magnitude: 11.01, magnitudeBand: 'V', colorIndex: 1.807, colorSystem: 'B-V', distanceError: 0.000065, distanceFromGaia: true });
+  });
+
   it('keeps two entries of one source apart, however close they are', () => {
     // Gaia resolves doubles Hipparcos saw as one star: two source ids 0.8″ apart are two stars,
     // and only *another* catalogue can claim to have already listed either of them.

src/app/shared/astro/star-merge.ts

@@ -222,12 +222,21 @@ export function isSameStar(kept: StarRecord, entry: StarRecord): boolean {
  * a catalogue number. HYG's "Proxima Centauri", "M5Ve" and V magnitude over Gaia's
  * "Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696", "Unknown" and G; keeping either row whole loses half of that,
  * and keeping Gaia's whole once cost the map 102 proper names and 32 000 spectral types. The id
- * travels with the description, so a star HYG knows keeps its HYG id from one refresh to the next;
- * `source` stays with the position, since that is what it records.
+ * travels with the description, so a star HYG knows keeps its HYG id from one refresh to the next,
+ * and so does its photometry, V and B−V. `source` stays with the position, since that is what it
+ * records, and so does the distance's error: Gaia's, not the Hipparcos one of a distance dropped.
  */
 function combine(kept: StarRecord, other: StarRecord): StarRecord {
   const described = isDesignation(kept) && !isDesignation(other) ? other : kept;
-  return { ...described, x: kept.x, y: kept.y, z: kept.z, source: kept.source };
+  return {
+    ...described,
+    x: kept.x,
+    y: kept.y,
+    z: kept.z,
+    source: kept.source,
+    distanceError: kept.distanceError,
+    distanceFromGaia: kept.distanceFromGaia
+  };
 }
 
 /**