juliensimon/constellation-catalog

Constellation Catalog

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

Complete catalog of all IAU-recognized constellations sourced from Wikidata, with IAU abbreviations, area in square degrees, brightest star, and mythological origin.

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 Eugene Delporte in 1930.

This dataset records each constellation with its IAU three-letter abbreviation, the area it covers in square degrees, 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.

This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. 'Q8928'); stable URI for cross-referencing enrichment sources and linking to other knowledge bases	Q9256	0.0%
name	string	Full IAU-recognized English name (e.g. 'Orion', 'Ursa Major'); all 88 official constellations covering the entire celestial sphere	Andromeda	0.0%
iau_abbreviation	string	IAU 3-letter abbreviation used in star names and catalogs (e.g. 'Ori', 'UMa'); standardized by Delporte 1930; null for non-standard entries	And	8.5%
symbol	string	Traditional figure or symbol the constellation depicts (e.g. 'hunter', 'bear'); null for constellations without a recorded symbol in Wikidata	http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Spe...	8.5%
area_sq_deg	float64	Area enclosed by IAU boundary in square degrees; range ~68 sq deg (Crux) to ~1303 sq deg (Hydra); total sky = 41,253 sq deg	722.0	8.5%
named_after	string	Mythological figure, animal, instrument, or object the constellation represents (e.g. 'Orion' the hunter); null for constellations without a recorded origin	Andromeda	20.2%

Quick stats

• 94 IAU-recognized constellations
• 86 with area in square degrees (total sky: ~40,337 sq deg)
• 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()

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))

# Area distribution
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df.dropna(subset=["area_sq_deg"]).sort_values("area_sq_deg").plot.barh(
    x="name", y="area_sq_deg", figsize=(8, 18), legend=False
)
plt.xlabel("Area (sq deg)")
plt.title("Constellation Areas")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Data source

https://www.wikidata.org/

Related datasets

• juliensimon/astronomer-database

• juliensimon/observatory-database

• juliensimon/bright-star-catalog

If you find this dataset useful, please consider giving it a like on Hugging Face. It helps others discover it.

About the author

Created by Julien Simon — AI Operating Partner at Fortino Capital. Part of the Space Datasets collection.

Citation

@dataset{constellation_catalog,
  title = {Constellation Catalog},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/constellation-catalog},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC0-1.0