SIMBAD

Observatory of Strasbourg

SIMBAD (the Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data) is an astronomical database of objects beyond the Solar System. It is maintained by the Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), France.

SIMBAD was created by merging the Catalog of Stellar Identifications (CSI) and the Bibliographic Star Index as they existed at the Meudon Computer Centre until 1979, and then expanded by additional source data from other catalogues and the academic literature. The first on-line interactive version, known as Version 2, was made available in 1981. Version 3, developed in the C language and running on UNIX stations at the Strasbourg Observatory, was released in 1990. Fall of 2006 saw the release of Version 4 of the database, now stored in PostgreSQL, and the supporting software, now written entirely in Java.

As of 11 October 2011, SIMBAD contains information for 5,446,342 objects under 15,224,536 different names, with 257,763 bibliographical references and 8,313,370 bibliographic citations.

An asteroid, 4692 SIMBAD (1983 VM7) is named in its honour.

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