Timeline of astronomical maps, catalogs, and surveys

Timeline of astronomical maps, catalogs and surveys

1800 BC - Babylonian star catalog
350 BC - Shin Shen's star catalog has almost 800 entries
134 BC - Hipparchus makes a detailed star map
ca. 140 - Ptolemy completes his Almagest, which contains a catalog of stars, observations of planetary motions, and treatises on geometry and cosmology
840 - al-Farghani Compendium of the Science of the Stars
963 - al-Sufi's star catalog Book of the Fixed Stars
1252-1272 - Alphonsine tables recorded
1437 - Publication of Ulugh Beg's Zij-i-Sultani
late 16th century - Tycho Brahe updates Ptolemy's Almagest
1603 - Johann Bayer's Uranometria
1678 - Edmund Halley publishes a catalog of 341 southern stars---first systematic southern sky survey
1726 - Posthumous publication of John Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis Britannica
1771 - Charles Messier publishes his first list of nebulae
1862 - Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander publishes his final edition of the Bonner Durchmusterung catalog of stars north of declination -1°.
1864 - John Herschel publishes the General Catalog of nebulae and star clusters
1887 - Paris conference institutes Carte du Ciel project to map entire sky to 14th mag photographically
1890 - John Dreyer publishes the New General Catalog of nebulae and star clusters
1932 - Harlow Shapley and Adelaide Ames publish A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter than the Thirteenth Magnitude, later known as the Shapley-Ames Catalog
1950-1957 - Completion of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) with the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt optical reflecting telescope. Actual date quoted varies upon source.
1962 - A.S. Bennett publishes the Revised 3C Catalog of 328 radio sources
1965 - Gerry Neugebauer and Robert Leighton begin a 2.2 micron sky survey with a 1.6-meter telescope on Mount Wilson
1982 - IRAS space observatory completes an all-sky mid-infrared survey
1990 - Publication of APM Galaxy Survey of 2+ million galaxies, to study Large-scale structure of the cosmos
1991 - ROSAT space observatory begins an all-sky X-ray survey
1993 - Start of the 20 cm VLA FIRST survey
1997 - Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) commences
1998 - Sloan Digital Sky Survey commences
2003 - 2dF Survey of Galaxy redshifts published; 2MASS completes