Files
star-map/tools/etl/fetchStars.ts
T
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 a81dd491ad 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>
2026-09-24 23:26:27 +02:00

222 lines
9.7 KiB
TypeScript

import { writeFileSync } from 'node:fs';
import { mergeStarCatalogues, placementDistancePc } from '../../src/app/shared/astro/star-merge';
import { encodeStarCatalog } from '../../src/app/shared/models/star-catalog';
import { StarRecord, SUN_STAR_ID } from '../../src/app/shared/models/star.model';
import { fetchGaiaDistancesByHip, fetchHipparcosParallaxErrors, GaiaAnswerError } from './sources/gaia';
import { positionalSources } from './sources/registry';
import { PARALLAX_PRECISION_MAS } from './sources/star-sources';
import { parseCsvObjects, parseOptionalNumber } from './lib/csv';
import { fetchTextCached } from './lib/http';
import { dataPath, ensureDataDir } from './lib/paths';
const HYG_CSV_URL = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/astronexus/HYG-Database/main/hyg/CURRENT/hygdata_v41.csv';
const HYG_UNKNOWN_DISTANCE_PC = 100000; // HYG's placeholder for unmeasured/unreliable parallax
/**
* Stand-in magnitude for a star with no photometry. Faint rather than 0, because 0 would mean
* "as bright as Vega" and render it as one of the largest points on the map.
*/
const UNKNOWN_MAGNITUDE = 15;
/**
* Stars either survey places within this distance (parsecs) of the Sun are kept for the galaxy
* view, and every naked-eye star wherever it is; `placementDistancePc` decides which distance a
* kept star is drawn at.
*
* Set at the range Hipparcos's own measurements reach rather than at a round number: its
* parallaxes are good to roughly a milliarcsecond, so at 250 pc (4 mas) a distance is uncertain
* by some tens of per cent. That is why it is not applied to the Hipparcos distance alone:
* Gaia puts 6 833 of the stars Hipparcos places inside it outside, and 3 666 the other way
* round. Only the *radial* placement blurs; a star's direction on the sky stays exact.
*
* The catalogue is also magnitude-limited, so this is not a volume-complete sample beyond about
* 50 pc: it thins to the intrinsically bright, which is the same selection the naked eye makes.
*/
const DISTANCE_CUTOFF_PC = Number(process.env['ETL_STAR_DISTANCE_PC'] ?? 250);
function resolveName(row: Record<string, string>): string {
if (row['proper']) {
return row['proper'];
}
if (row['bayer'] && row['con']) {
return `${row['bayer']} ${row['con']}`;
}
if (row['flam'] && row['con']) {
return `${row['flam']} ${row['con']}`;
}
if (row['hd']) {
return `HD ${row['hd']}`;
}
if (row['gl']) {
// Already a complete designation ("Gl 581", "GJ 3512"), unlike the bare numbers in `hd`
// and `hip` — prefixing it again produced 2331 stars named "Gl GJ 1076", which broke
// search, the on-screen labels, and exoplanet host-star name matching alike.
return row['gl'];
}
if (row['hip']) {
return `HIP ${row['hip']}`;
}
return `HYG ${row['id']}`;
}
/**
* Downloads the HYG (Hipparcos/Yale/Gliese) stellar database, places each star along its
* equatorial direction (epoch J2000.0) at the better of its Hipparcos and Gaia distances, keeps
* the ones either survey puts within range, unions the other positional sources, and writes
* `stars.bin` (packed positions) + `stars-index.json` (everything else).
*/
export async function fetchStars(): Promise<StarRecord[]> {
console.log(`Fetching HYG star catalog (distance cutoff: ${DISTANCE_CUTOFF_PC} pc)...`);
const csv = await fetchTextCached(HYG_CSV_URL, 'hygdata_v41.csv');
const rows = parseCsvObjects(csv);
// Not skipped when unreachable, unlike the positional sources below; see its own comment.
const gaiaByHip = await fetchGaiaDistancesByHip();
const hipparcosErrors = await fetchHipparcosParallaxErrors();
const stars: StarRecord[] = [];
let atGaiaDistance = 0;
let pastCutoff = 0;
for (const row of rows) {
const id = Number(row['id']);
if (id === SUN_STAR_ID) {
stars.push({ id, name: 'Sol', x: 0, y: 0, z: 0, magnitude: parseOptionalNumber(row['mag']) ?? UNKNOWN_MAGNITUDE, magnitudeBand: 'V', spectralType: row['spect'] || 'G2V', colorIndex: parseOptionalNumber(row['ci']) ?? null, colorSystem: 'B-V' });
continue;
}
const hygPc = Number(row['dist']);
const hipparcosPc = Number.isFinite(hygPc) && hygPc > 0 && hygPc < HYG_UNKNOWN_DISTANCE_PC ? hygPc : undefined;
const gaia = row['hip'] ? gaiaByHip.get(Number(row['hip'])) : undefined;
const gaiaPc = gaia?.distancePc;
const magnitudeV = parseOptionalNumber(row['mag']);
const magnitude = magnitudeV ?? UNKNOWN_MAGNITUDE;
const distancePc = placementDistancePc(hipparcosPc, gaiaPc, magnitude, DISTANCE_CUTOFF_PC);
if (distancePc === null) {
continue;
}
// HYG's own Cartesian columns rather than its `ra`/`dec`, which are in the same frame as
// `raDecDistanceToXyz` and would be redundant if the two agreed. They do not, for the stars
// that move: the right ascension was carried from the Hipparcos epoch to 2000.0 without the
// cos δ its motion needs, which puts Proxima 17.9″ from where HYG's own x/y/z — and Gaia,
// once brought to the same epoch — have it. 1813 stars differ by over an arcsecond, and the
// Cartesian columns are the ones Gaia agrees with for 1155 of them against 156 (one of those,
// HIP 57146, has x/y/z 161″ from its own ra/dec and stays double).
//
// Only their direction is used. They sit at HYG's own distance, or at its 100 000 pc
// placeholder where it has none, and are carried along that direction to the one chosen above.
const x = Number(row['x']);
const y = Number(row['y']);
const z = Number(row['z']);
const length = Math.hypot(x, y, z);
if (![x, y, z].every(Number.isFinite) || length === 0) {
continue;
}
const scale = distancePc / length;
if (gaiaPc !== undefined) {
atGaiaDistance++;
}
if (distancePc > DISTANCE_CUTOFF_PC) {
pastCutoff++;
}
// Gaia's error with Gaia's distance, Hipparcos's with its own; a Gliese row, with neither, has
// no published error, and its distance is as often photometric as measured.
const distanceError = gaia?.relativeError ?? (row['hip'] ? hipparcosErrors.get(Number(row['hip'])) : undefined);
const colorIndex = parseOptionalNumber(row['ci']);
stars.push({
id,
name: resolveName(row),
x: x * scale,
y: y * scale,
z: z * scale,
magnitude,
...(magnitudeV === undefined ? {} : { magnitudeBand: 'V' as const }),
spectralType: row['spect'] || 'Unknown',
colorIndex: colorIndex ?? null,
...(colorIndex === undefined ? {} : { colorSystem: 'B-V' as const }),
...(distanceError === undefined ? {} : { distanceError }),
distanceFromGaia: gaia !== undefined,
// Only for the Gliese-only rows, whose positions are what the merge needs the motion to see
// past. A Hipparcos position is good to under an arcsecond; given its motion too, 15 stars
// took their co-moving companion's Gaia entry, and the companion was kept twice.
...(row['hip'] ? {} : { pmRaMasYr: parseOptionalNumber(row['pmra']), pmDecMasYr: parseOptionalNumber(row['pmdec']) })
});
}
console.log(` kept ${stars.length} stars (of ${rows.length} in the catalog): ${atGaiaDistance} at Gaia's distance, ${pastCutoff} of them past ${DISTANCE_CUTOFF_PC} pc.`);
const merged = await mergeWithOtherSources(stars);
merged.sort((a, b) => a.id - b.id);
writeStarAssets(merged);
return merged;
}
/**
* Unions HYG with every other positional source that is wired in and reachable.
*
* A source that cannot be reached is reported and skipped here rather than thrown, so a run still
* gets as far as validation and says what it has. Whether that may be published is decided
* there: `validateMerge` in build.ts refuses a catalogue Gaia contributed nothing to. A source
* that answered with something unusable ({@link GaiaAnswerError}) is a different matter, and stops
* the run where it happened rather than being reported later as an outage.
*/
async function mergeWithOtherSources(hygStars: StarRecord[]): Promise<StarRecord[]> {
const others = positionalSources().filter((source) => source.id !== 'hyg');
if (others.length === 0) {
return hygStars;
}
const candidates = [{ sourceId: 'hyg', parallaxPrecisionMas: PARALLAX_PRECISION_MAS['hyg'], stars: hygStars }];
for (const source of others) {
try {
candidates.push({
sourceId: source.id,
parallaxPrecisionMas: PARALLAX_PRECISION_MAS[source.id] ?? 1,
stars: await source.fetch!()
});
} catch (error) {
// An answer that cannot be worked with is not an outage: skipping it would write a
// half-catalogue over the published assets before the merge gate got to say so.
if (error instanceof GaiaAnswerError) {
throw error;
}
console.log(` skipping ${source.name}: ${error instanceof Error ? error.message : error}`);
}
}
if (candidates.length === 1) {
return hygStars;
}
const { stars, summary } = mergeStarCatalogues(candidates);
console.log(` merged ${summary.total} stars from ${candidates.length} catalogues (${summary.duplicates} entries folded into a better-measured one):`);
for (const [sourceId, count] of Object.entries(summary.bySource)) {
console.log(` ${sourceId}: ${count}`);
}
return stars;
}
export function writeStarAssets(stars: StarRecord[]): void {
ensureDataDir();
// The layout lives in `star-catalog.ts`, which the app decodes with — one definition, so the
// writer and the reader cannot drift.
const { index, positions, meta } = encodeStarCatalog(stars);
writeFileSync(dataPath('stars.bin'), Buffer.from(positions.buffer));
writeFileSync(dataPath('stars-meta.bin'), Buffer.from(meta));
writeFileSync(dataPath('stars-index.json'), JSON.stringify(index));
}
if (require.main === module) {
fetchStars().catch((error) => {
console.error(error);
process.exitCode = 1;
});
}