juliensimon/nebula-catalog

Nebula Catalog

Part of the Astronomy Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

A comprehensive catalog of 60,363 nebulae sourced from Wikidata, covering emission, reflection, dark, and planetary nebulae across the sky.

Dataset description

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), distance from Earth, angular size on the sky, and a representative catalog identifier. This enables sky-survey cross-matching, population studies by type or constellation, and distance/size distribution analysis.

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

Schema

Column	Type	Description
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q12345)
name	string	Common or catalog name
nebula_type	string	Nebula type (emission, reflection, dark, planetary)
constellation	string	Host constellation
ra_deg	float	Right ascension (degrees)
dec_deg	float	Declination (degrees)
distance_ly	float	Distance from Earth (light-years)
angular_size	float	Angular size (arcminutes)
catalog_id	string	Catalog identifier (NGC, IC, Messier, etc.)

Quick stats

• 60,363 nebulae total
• 38,616 with equatorial coordinates
• 294 with distance measurements
• Distance range: 3 – 67,200,000 light-years
• Top constellations: Boötes (2,663), Aquila (2,363), Scutum (1,751), Sagittarius (1,688), Scorpius (1,667)

Breakdown by type

• dark nebula: 21,031
• active galactic nucleus: 17,587
• summit: 17,275
• hill: 2,695
• mountain: 1,539
• spiral galaxy: 129
• volcano: 16
• star: 13

Usage

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 known distances
pn = df[(df["nebula_type"] == "planetary nebula") & df["distance_ly"].notna()]
print(pn[["name", "constellation", "distance_ly"]].sort_values("distance_ly").head(10))

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

# Largest nebulae by angular size
largest = df[df["angular_size"].notna()].nlargest(10, "angular_size")
print(largest[["name", "nebula_type", "angular_size", "constellation"]])

Data source

Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. Nebulae identified via property P31 (instance of) for four nebula-type entities. Data is community-curated and reflects contributions from astronomical cataloguing projects worldwide.

Update schedule

Quarterly (January, April, July, October). Re-run manually at any time to pick up newly catalogued objects.

Related datasets

• planetary-nebulae -- dedicated planetary nebula catalog
• ngc-ic-catalog -- NGC/IC catalog of deep-sky objects
• messier-catalog -- Messier 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{nebula_catalog,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Nebula Catalog},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/nebula-catalog},
  note = {Sourced from Wikidata (CC0)}
}

License

CC0-1.0 (Wikidata content is public domain)