HEALPix-indexed star catalog combining Gaia DR3 and Hipparcos. Memory-mapped for fast cone searches.

As a library:

[dependencies]
celestial-catalog = "0.1"

For the CLI tools (forge and query-catalog):

cargo install celestial-catalog --features cli

use celestial_catalog::query::{Catalog, cone_search, ConeSearchParams};

let catalog = Catalog::open("/path/to/catalog.bin").unwrap();

let results = cone_search(&catalog, &ConeSearchParams {
    ra_deg: 83.633,
    dec_deg: 22.014,
    radius_deg: 0.5,
    max_mag: Some(12.0),
    max_results: Some(100),
    epoch: None,
}).unwrap();

for r in &results {
    println!("{} mag={:.2} dist={:.4}°", r.star.source_id, r.star.mag, r.distance_deg);
}

You may download the latest catalog from Google Drive. The pre-built catalog has a magnitude cutoff at 18.5.

The pre-built catalog is derived from:

• Gaia DR3 — European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (gaia.esa.int), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC). Gaia DR3 is licensed under CC-BY-4.0. See the Gaia credit page for full citation requirements.
• Hipparcos — ESA Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues (ESA, 1997). Public domain.

If you use the pre-built catalog in published work, please cite Gaia DR3 per ESA's guidelines.

Building your own catalog from raw survey data requires significant disk space (~700 GB for raw Gaia CSVs) and time. The forge CLI handles the full pipeline: download, ingest, merge, and index.

forge download-gaia --output /path/to/download/it/to

See forge ingest-gaia --help for all flags.

forge ingest-gaia \
    --path /path/to/gaia/dir/ \
    --output /path/to/output/dir/ \
    --mag-limit 16

Outputs gaia_ingest.bin.

Most applications don't need stars fainter than ~18.5. A this cutoff keeps the final HEALPix binary around 1.5 GB. Going deeper balloons quickly.

Hipparcos epochs are propagated to J2016.0 to match Gaia DR3.

forge ingest-hipparcos \
    --hip /path/to/hip_main.dat \
    --crossmatch /path/to/Hipparcos2BestNeighbour.csv \
    --output /path/to/output

Outputs hipparcos_ingest.bin.

forge merge --verbose --workdir /path/to/working/dir

Outputs merged.bin.

forge build-index \
    --workdir /path/that/contains/both/bin/files \
    --threads 16 \
    --output ./catalog.20260217.bin \
    --max-per-cell 40

The --max-per-cell flag caps the number of stars per HEALPix pixel, dropping faint stars first. This trims dense regions along the galactic plane.

• cli — Enables the forge and query-catalog binaries (adds clap, rayon, reqwest, etc.)

Licensed under either of:

• Apache License, Version 2.0
• MIT License

See the repository for contribution guidelines.