juliensimon/constellation-catalog

Constellation Catalog

Part of the Astronomy Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Complete catalog of all 94 IAU-recognized constellations, sourced from Wikidata.

Dataset description

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially recognizes 88 constellations that together tile the entire celestial sphere. These range from ancient Greek figures catalogued by Ptolemy in the Almagest to southern-hemisphere constellations added by European explorers in the 16th–18th centuries and formalized by Eugène Delporte in 1930.

This dataset records each constellation with its IAU three-letter abbreviation, the area it covers in square degrees, the coordinates of its center (right ascension and declination), its brightest star, and the mythological figure or object it was named after. This enables sky-coverage analysis, educational tools, and cross-referencing with star and deep-sky-object catalogs.

Sourced from Wikidata's structured knowledge base (property P31=Q8928 for instance-of:constellation), maintained by the astronomy community.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q8928)
name	string	Full English name of the constellation
iau_abbreviation	string	IAU three-letter abbreviation (e.g. Ori, UMa)
symbol	string	Traditional symbol or figure
brightest_star	string	Common name of the brightest star
area_sq_deg	float	Area of the constellation in square degrees
ra_center	float	Right ascension of center (degrees)
dec_center	float	Declination of center (degrees)
named_after	string	Mythological figure, animal, or object it represents

Quick stats

• 94 IAU-recognized constellations
• 86 with area in square degrees (total sky: ~40,337 sq deg)
• 2 with sky coordinates (RA/Dec center)
• 0 with brightest star identified
• 75 with named-after mythology or origin

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/constellation-catalog", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Largest constellations by area
print(df.nlargest(10, "area_sq_deg")[["name", "iau_abbreviation", "area_sq_deg"]])

# Constellations named after mythological figures
myth = df[df["named_after"].notna()]
print(myth[["name", "named_after"]].head(10))

# Northern sky constellations (positive declination)
northern = df[df["dec_center"] > 0]
print(f"{len(northern)} northern-hemisphere constellations")

# Find by IAU abbreviation
orion = df[df["iau_abbreviation"] == "Ori"].iloc[0]
print(f"Orion: {orion['area_sq_deg']:.0f} sq deg, brightest star: {orion['brightest_star']}")

Data source

Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. Constellations identified via property P31 (instance of) = Q8928 (constellation). IAU formalization by Eugène Delporte (1930).

Update schedule

Quarterly (January, April, July, October). Re-run manually to pick up Wikidata improvements.

Related datasets

• astronomer-database -- Astronomer biographies
• observatory-database -- Astronomical observatories
• bright-star-catalog -- Yale Bright Star Catalog

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{constellation_catalog,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Constellation Catalog},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/constellation-catalog},
  note = {Sourced from Wikidata (CC0)}
}

License

CC0-1.0 (Wikidata content is public domain)