No common star names?

[hackerb9]

A friend asked me if a certain star we could see was Deneb. I pulled out Planisphere, long pressed on the star, and was given a puzzling menu. Although I had turned the max magnitude down so it seemed like I was picking only one star, I was given a list of ten and it was impossible to guess which was the one I wanted. I would have gone for the brightest, but the menu didn't have any indication of magnitude.

Worse, I didn't recognize any of the names. Was it HR7796 (36Gam Cyg)? HR 7615 (21Eta Cyg)?

I clicked on a few but never found anything that said what the common name for the star was.

Please add common star names to Planisphere. Also, please consider Max Magnitude when showing a list of possible objects.

Thank you.

[tengel]

The list only shoes the HR number from the Bright Star Catalogue. For example, Deneb is HR 7924. The name in brackets is "50Alp Cyg". This is short for "α Cygni" in Bayer designation and "50 Cygni" in Flamsteed_designation.

Proper star names are part of the Bright Star Catalogue, but the name field is too messy. It would need a curated list which converts HR number to proper name.

The list always shows at least ten items. The objects are ordered by distance from the long press location. The setting of the maximum magnitude should be considered. Only stars which are on the chart should be in the list. I will add the magnitude to the list for easier identification.

The search for nearby objects is partly broken close to 0°/360° azimuth and close to 90° elevation.

[hackerb9]

Thank you. Limiting the search to only visible objects will help a lot.

I suggest including the magnitude as an icon of varying size since the HR star "names" are already very number heavy and a specific magnitude number isn't necessary if you're just visually scanning for the brightest.

Names of stars (and constellations) seem to be inherently messy for any app that aims to be multilingual. Somehow "Stellarium" seems to get it right, at least from my American English perspective. Perhaps whatever database they are using can be borrowed for Planisphere?

[hackerb9]

I found a description of Stellarium's sky culture database: https://github.com/Stellarium/stellarium-skycultures

[jpfox]

Hi and thanks for this great app,

There is a list giving corresponding star name to HR ids

https://www.iau.org/public/themes/naming_stars/

Maybe you could import it as a resource ?

Having star name in search list result would be very useful :-)

[tengel]

6bc34a8 adds star names from iau.org