The Preliminary Third Catalogue of Nearby Stars - CNS3

Sortable Catalogue
Full Data Listing
Catalogue Read Me File

About the Catalogue

The Preliminary Version of the Third Catalogue of Nearby Stars by W. Gliese and H. Jahreiss, Astron. Rechen-Institut, Heidelberg (1991), contains all known stars within 80 light years of the Sun. It gives the distances and spectral classifications of 3803 nearby stars. It presents the results of many thousands of hours of painstaking parallax and spectroscopic data gathering and analysis by scores of astronomers over the course of the twentieth century.

The catalogue was obtained from the Astronomical Data Centre: http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ Document url: ftp://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/adc/archives/catalogs/5/5070A/catalog.dat.gz

General Observations

Most of the stars in the list are less luminous than the Sun. When the list is sorted in order of absolute brightness, the Sun occupies 527th place out of 3803.

Number of stars by spectral type:

   Spectral Type     Num of Stars
       O                    0
       B                    3
       A                   75
       F                  267
       G                  506 (The Sun is a G star)
       K                  902
       M                1,743

       white dwarfs        91