Keep every star the naked eye sees, Rigel, Deneb and Alnilam among them

The 250 pc cutoff took 1 543 of HYG's 8 920 stars of V 6.5 or brighter:
1 339 that both surveys put past it and 204 HYG has no distance for. Five
of the fifty brightest stars in the sky were gone (Rigel, Deneb, Alnilam,
gamma-2 Vel, Wezen), and Naos, Sadr, Aludra and Arneb with them, while
11th-magnitude Gaia stars at the same distance were drawn. The cutoff
bounds a download, not what the sky shows.

placementDistancePc now keeps a star of V 6.5 or brighter at any distance,
at the better of its two distances as before: Gaia's where the archive's
Hipparcos cross-match has a usable parallax, Hipparcos's otherwise. Gaia
saturates on the brightest, so Rigel (264.6 pc), Deneb (432.9), Alnilam
(606.1), Wezen (492.6), Naos, Sadr, Aludra and Arneb sit at their
Hipparcos distance. 1 502 HYG rows come back, 165 of the 206 without a
Hipparcos distance among them because Gaia measured them; 36 fold into a
Gaia entry. 41 naked-eye stars stay out because neither survey gives them
a distance: beta Phe, Polis, Mu Cep, Rho Cas, Eta Car, Alp Cam, Phi Cas,
Chi Aur, Psi-1 Aur, theta-1 Ori, Omi-1 Cen, 66 Ori, 16 Sgr, 10 Sge and 27
HD stars.

Measured on the rebuilt catalogue: 425 117 stars (+1 466), 8 301 of them
past 250 pc (+1 466), the same 336 within 10 pc and 3 652 within 25 pc.
Merge gate: 12 352 HYG rows without a Gaia counterpart (was 10 886; the
ceiling of 15 000 is unchanged, and its comment now counts the naked-eye
stars among the survivors) and the same 23 cross-catalogue pairs under an
arcsecond. Five more exoplanets find their host: HD 81817 b and c,
HD 158996 b, HD 208527 b, HD 220074 b. gzip -9 sizes: stars.bin
4 711 922 -> 4 728 315 B, stars-meta.bin 2 576 213 -> 2 587 977 B,
stars-index.json 3 724 855 -> 3 731 763 B.

The brief behind this also asked to cut once on the best distance, which
would drop the 6 835 stars Hipparcos puts inside 250 pc and Gaia outside.
Those already sit at Gaia's distance (4eb61ff), so nothing is misplaced,
and they stay.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-24 19:36:34 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5
parent c38a42cbcb
commit c64eea0803
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