Star catalogue in the context of Star position

A star is a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by self-gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night; their immense distances from Earth make them appear as fixed points of light. The most prominent stars have been categorised into constellations and asterisms, and many of the brightest stars have proper names. Astronomers have assembled star catalogues that identify the known stars and provide standardized stellar designations. The observable universe contains an estimated 10 to 10 stars. Only about 4,000 of these stars are visible to the naked eye—all within the Milky Way galaxy.

A star's life begins with the gravitational collapse of a gaseous nebula of material largely comprising hydrogen, helium, and traces of heavier elements. Its total mass mainly determines its evolution and eventual fate. A star shines for most of its active life due to the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core. This process releases energy that traverses the star's interior and radiates into outer space. At the end of a star's lifetime, fusion ceases and its core becomes a stellar remnant: a white dwarf, a neutron star, or—if it is sufficiently massive—a black hole.

Astronomy in China has a long history stretching from the Shang dynasty, being refined over a period of more than 3,000 years. The ancient Chinese people have identified stars from 1300 BCE, as Chinese star names later categorized in the twenty-eight mansions have been found on oracle bones unearthed at Anyang, dating back to the mid-Shang dynasty. The core of the "mansion" (宿 xiù) system also took shape around this period, by the time of King Wu Ding (1250–1192 BCE).

Detailed records of astronomical observations began during the Warring States period (fourth century BCE). They flourished during the Han period (202 BCE – 220 CE) and subsequent dynasties with the publication of star catalogues. Chinese astronomy was equatorial, centered on close observation of circumpolar stars, and was based on different principles from those in traditional Western astronomy, where heliacal risings and settings of zodiac constellations formed the basic ecliptic framework. Joseph Needham has described the ancient Chinese as the most persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena anywhere in the world before the Islamic astronomers.

In astronomy, stars have a variety of different stellar designations and names, including catalogue designations, current and historical proper names, and foreign language names.

Only a tiny minority of known stars have proper names; all others have only designations from various catalogues or lists, or no identifier at all. Hipparchus in the 2nd century BC enumerated about 850 naked-eye stars. Johann Bayer in 1603 listed about twice this number. Only in the 19th century did star catalogues list the naked-eye stars exhaustively. The Bright Star Catalogue, which is a star catalogue listing all stars of apparent magnitude 6.5 or brighter, or roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth, contains 9,096 stars. The most voluminous modern catalogues list on the order of a billion stars, out of an estimated total of 200 to 400 billion in the Milky Way.

Gan De (Chinese: 甘德; fl. 4th century BC), also known as the Lord Gan (Gan Gong), was an ancient Chinese astronomer and astrologer born in the State of Qi. Along with Shi Shen, he is believed to be the first in history known by name to compile a star catalogue, preceded by the anonymous authors of the early Babylonian star catalogues and followed by the Greek Hipparchus who is the first known in the Western tradition of Hellenistic astronomy to have compiled a star catalogue. He also made observations of the planets, particularly Jupiter. His writings are lost, but some of his works' titles and fragments quoted from them are known from later texts.

Gan De may have been the first to describe one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, usually invisible without the aid of telescopes. In the 20th century, a fragment of Gan's work, in a later compilation of astronomical texts, was identified by Xi Zezong as describing a naked-eye observation of either of the two largest and brightest moons, Ganymede or Callisto in summer 365 BC.

Apparent magnitude (m) is a measure of the brightness of a star, astronomical object or other celestial objects like artificial satellites. Its value depends on its intrinsic luminosity, its distance, and any extinction of the object's light caused by interstellar dust or atmosphere along the line of sight to the observer.

Unless stated otherwise, the word magnitude in astronomy usually refers to a celestial object's apparent magnitude. The magnitude scale likely dates to before the ancient Roman astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, whose star catalog popularized the system by listing stars from 1st magnitude (brightest) to 6th magnitude (dimmest). The modern scale was mathematically defined to closely match this historical system by Norman Pogson in 1856.

An astronomical catalogue is a list or tabulation of astronomical objects, typically grouped together because they share a common type, morphology, origin, means of detection, or method of discovery. The oldest and largest are star catalogues. Hundreds have been published, including general ones and special ones for such objects as infrared stars, variable stars, giant stars, multiple star systems, star clusters, and so forth.

General catalogues for deep-sky objects or for objects other than stars are also large. Again, there are specialized ones for nebulas, galaxies, X-ray sources, radio sources, quasars and other classes. The same is true for asteroids, comets and other solar system bodies.

The Bright Star Catalogue, also known as the Yale Catalogue of Bright Stars, Yale Bright Star Catalogue, or just YBS, is a star catalogue that lists all stars of stellar magnitude 6.5 or brighter, which is roughly every star visible to the naked eye from Earth. The catalog lists 9,110 objects, of which 9,095 are stars, 11 are novae or supernovae (which were "bright stars" only at the time when they were at their peak), and four are non-stellar objects which are the globular clusters 47 Tucanae (designated HR 95) and NGC 2808 (HR 3671), and the open clusters NGC 2281 (HR 2496) and Messier 67 (HR 3515).

The catalogue is fixed in number of entries, but its data is maintained, and it is appended with a comments section about the objects that has been steadily enhanced. The abbreviation for the catalog as a whole is BS or YBS but all citations of stars it indexes use HR before the catalog number, a homage to the catalog's direct predecessor, published in 1908, named the Harvard Revised Photometry Catalogue.

The Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars (German pronunciation: [ˈɡliːzə], English GLEE-zə) is a star catalogue listing stars located within 25 parsecs (82 ly) of the Sun.

Chen Zhuo (fl. 3rd century) was a Chinese astronomer who lived in the Three Kingdoms period (220–280) of China. He served as an imperial astronomer in the state of Eastern Wu (222–280). He collected the works of earlier astronomers of the Han dynasty and combined them into a single system. His star catalogue listed 1,464 stars in 283 constellations. His works were lost over the course of history, but information on his system of constellations survives in Tang dynasty records, notably by Qutan Xida.