I have spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out various star catalogs, with not much success. It seeems there are more star catalogs than stars I'm interested in. With a lot of work I have been able to find most of my 30 favorite stars spread through the 3 AN star catalogs.

I have tried Argonaut to see if I couldd see the listings in the catalogs, apparently that won't work. I realize that at almost 10k stars, a listing could be onerous.

I have downloaded the 5 Struve catalogs. They have STXX designations. I thought the common designation for Struve was the upper case sigma letter. Some clarification or a guide for the designations used by AN could be most helpful.

2 examples of my frustration would be La Superba, and VY Canis Major.

Other than this I have found AN very useful, and amazingly sophisticated. I'm sure the star catalogs are every bit as sophisticated, too sophisticated for me to make full use.

Regard to all interested, Steve

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the post.

If you access a star, say in the MISC VARIABLE STARS catalog, so that the display that says "GUIDE" in the bottom line appears,
then if you scroll the dial clockwise it will successively show the name of each star in the internally ordered list of that particular catalog.

For example, if you enter Y AUR and then spin the dial clockwise, you will see Y CAE, Y CAR, Y CAS, Y CEP and so on.

If you spin the dial in the counter-clockwise direction, then the display will show them in reverse order in which they are internally stored.

Typically this is not the way you would access an arbitrary star. Normally you would "spell" its name out one symbol at a time using the dial and enter button in combination.
However, the feature whereby you can scroll through each item in a catalog is handy if you want to get a feel what is in there.

There are a selected subset of stars in the MISC VARIABLE STARS catalog out of all the known variable stars that exist.
For example, UY CMA and Y CVN do not appear.

You might want to make use of the User Catalog feature to load your own. The User Manual pp 174-179 explains how to do this.

The ability to scroll through a catalog one object at a time is true of all catalogs.

Appendix H gives a listing of how Argo Navis internally orders its symbols. Whereas the alphabetic characters are self-evident, the listing in Appendix H on page 239 shows, for
example, that the Σ symbol is probably most quickly accessed from within the MISC DOUBLE STAR CATALOG by spinning counterclockwise from the initial object, which happens to be A 1767,
so that you turn the A into a Σ and then use the enter button and dial from there to access the Struve object of interest. There are also O Struve objects, which are accessed by first entering a O then the Σ.

For stars in the BRIGHT STAR CATALOG, they come with constellation abbreviation first followed by Bayer or Flamsteed desigantor.

Hope these tips are helpful.