Pretty Deep Maps - chart abbreviations

[almcl]

Anyone use Martin Meredith's Pretty Deep Maps?

I think it's a wonderful resource and to have it for free is amazing, but almost every time I go to look something up, I come up against an abbreviation on the chart that I have no idea of the meaning of and a Google search often doesn't turn up anything relevant.  

Today's poser was 'what does ARA stand for' (screen shot below -  ARA 1838 was the object of interest) but in general I'd love to find an index of all the abbreviations, catalogues &c used on the chart, if anyone knows of one?

[fwm891]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_catalogues

[AKB]

2 minutes ago, fwm891 said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomical_catalogues

...so many to choose from ...!!

[almcl]

Thanks Francis.

From that I managed to get to this page:

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/39940-catalog-names/

and the sixth post answered my immediate question.

[Martin Meredith]

Hi Almcl

Glad you find the maps useful! A catalogue of abbreviations would be a useful addition. I've moved on to other projects for the moment (and indeed changed my preferred programming language since constructing the maps), but one day soon I hope to get back to update them, particularly with the GAIA data.

The approach I suggest for now is to check out the original data sources I list in the technical document describing the maps: https://www.dropbox.com/s/p67h77kgbb5lo6w/technical.pdf?dl=0

This will tell you which catalogue(s) I used for each type of object. Most are available via the Vizier server.

The specific case you mention comes from the WDS catalogue. You can access a table linking discoverer abbreviations with more details, including links to the original article reporting the discovery, by using this link  http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-3?-source=B/wds/refs and entering the abbreviation in the 'Disc' field

I'm happy also to provide the info directly.

BTW Which PDF browser (and version) do you use with the maps? I ask because several people have had problems with hyperlinks with certain browsers.

cheers

Martin

[almcl]

Hello Martin

Many thanks for that (and Pretty Deep Maps itself).  Although I have a short cut to the Technical Companion on my desktop, it possibly assumes a level of knowledge that I have yet to attain - I wasn't sure which type of object to search for, but now see it is in the double (or multiple!) stars category.  The Vizier link is very helpful, thanks!

I am using Adobe Reader XI on a Win7 pro machine but also have Adobe Reader DC on a Win 10 home machine where PDM runs fine also.  In both cases all ~7000 pdfs are in the same directory.

In the past I used Foxit Reader but when that started to suffer from bloat and didn't work with PDM I switched back to Adobe Reader (on advice from your good self) and have been happily using