ABSTRACT
Newcomb's 'Fundamental Catalogue of Standard Stars', published in 1899, is of this kind, embodying weighted mean results from all standard catalogues from Bradley's time, reduced to a common epoch by the employment of revised constants. It is to be applied to a catalogue of 40,000 stars to the 10th magnitude, and a repetition of the determinations of the first 'Harvard Photometry' is promised by the new method in addition. The historic problem of stellar parallax is an application of the ordinary question in surveying, 'to determine the distance of an inaccessible object', with very strict limitations on the choice of a baseline, and exceedingly small differences of angle to be measured, necessitating very great care and accuracy. After the time of Al Sufi's catalogue, many ages elapsed before a catalogue appeared in which photometry was the chief feature. B. A. Gould's 'Uranometria Argentina', giving the magnitudes of over 8000 stars visible at Cordoba, was published in 1879.
