juliensimon/nebula-catalog

Nebula Catalog

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face.

Dataset description

Catalog of nebulae sourced from Wikidata, covering emission, reflection, dark, and planetary nebulae across the sky.

Nebulae are clouds of interstellar gas and dust -- the birthplaces of stars, the remnants of dying ones, and some of the most visually spectacular objects in the universe. This dataset aggregates structured data from Wikidata's knowledge base, drawing on decades of cataloguing from Messier, NGC, IC, and other surveys.

Each entry includes the nebula's name, type, host constellation, equatorial coordinates (right ascension and declination), and representative catalog identifiers. This enables sky-survey cross-matching, population studies by type or constellation, and spatial distribution analysis.

Sourced from Wikidata SPARQL using P31 (instance of) for emission (Q207326), reflection (Q167278), dark (Q46587), and planetary (Q204194) nebulae.

This dataset is suitable for tabular classification tasks.

Schema

Column	Type	Description	Sample	Null %
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. 'Q12345'); stable URI for cross-referencing other catalogs and knowledge bases	Q85589522	0.0%
name	string	Common or catalog name as recorded in Wikidata (e.g. 'Orion Nebula', 'NGC 1499', 'Barnard 68'); null for objects with no recorded label	2dFS 1734	0.0%
nebula_type	string	Physical nebula class: 'planetary nebula' (expanding shell from AGB star), 'emission nebula' (ionized HII region), 'reflection nebula' (dust scattering starlight), 'dark nebula' (opaque dust blocking background), 'supernova remnant' (ejecta from stellar explosion)	dark nebula	0.0%
constellation	string	IAU constellation in which the nebula is located (e.g. 'Orion', 'Cygnus'); null if not recorded in Wikidata	Tucana	2.0%
ra_deg	float64	Right ascension in decimal degrees, ICRS J2000.0; range 0-360; null if coordinates not in Wikidata	15.773833	0.8%
dec_deg	float64	Declination in decimal degrees, ICRS J2000.0; range -90 to +90; null if coordinates not in Wikidata	-72.167944	0.8%
catalog_id	string	Cross-reference identifiers from NGC, IC, Messier, and other catalogs, semicolon-separated (e.g. 'NGC 1952; M 1'); null for objects catalogued only in Wikidata	2dFS 1734; MCPS 1.051561-72.16803; OG...	0.1%

Quick stats

• 21,033 nebulae total
• 20,864 with equatorial coordinates
• 21,018 with catalog identifiers
• Top constellations: Aquila (2,352), Scutum (1,750), Scorpius (1,656), Sagittarius (1,648), Cygnus (1,409)

Breakdown by type

• dark nebula: 21,031
• emission nebula: 1
• reflection nebula: 1

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

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

from datasets import load_dataset

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

# Count by nebula type
print(df["nebula_type"].value_counts())

# Planetary nebulae with coordinates
pn = df[(df["nebula_type"] == "planetary nebula") & df["ra_deg"].notna()]
print(pn[["name", "constellation", "ra_deg", "dec_deg"]].head(10))

# Nebulae in Orion
orion = df[df["constellation"] == "Orion"]
print(f"{len(orion):,} nebulae in Orion")

# Distribution by type
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
df["nebula_type"].value_counts().plot.barh()
plt.xlabel("Count")
plt.title("Nebulae by Type")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Data source

https://www.wikidata.org/

Related datasets

• juliensimon/planetary-nebulae

• juliensimon/ngc-ic-catalog

• juliensimon/messier-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{nebula_catalog,
  title = {Nebula Catalog},
  author = {juliensimon},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/nebula-catalog},
  publisher = {Hugging Face}
}

License

CC0-1.0