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The Gliese Catalog
What is it? Also known as the Catalog of Nearby Stars, the Gliese Catalog was the first concerted effort to list all of the stars near our own. Based on trigonometric parallax, the distances to all but the nearest stars are questionable at best. Beyond about thirty parsecs (roughly one hundred light years), the calculated distances become meaningless as the parallactic shift being measured becomes smaller than the margin of error. The Hipparcos project, however, greatly increased the usable trigonometric range over that of ground-based telescopes. Three editions have been compiled by the German astronomer, Wilhelm Gliese, for which the catalog was named. The second edition appeared in 1969 and included over 1,700 stars. By 1991, when the preliminary version of the third edition came out, the number of stars known to exist within 25 parsecs had swelled to nearly 4,000. |