Ad Standard Astronomical Object Designations; NGC, IC, Messier, Caldwell, Struve, van den Bergh, etc

[artao]

Pretty please? It would make looking stuff up in the galactic map WAY easier. I'm an amateur astronomer, you see.
All that needs to be stored is numbers, which can be stored VERY compactly if you do it bitwise. So it really shouldn't take up much space. Maybe a few megabytes.

For instance:
NGC 7000 - The North American Nebula
M42 - The Orion Nebula
Struve - For multiple-star systems. But in the game only TRUE multi-star systems. Not optical doubles which are included in the Struve catalog.
NGC 6720 or M57 - The Ring Nebula
NGC 1952 - The Crab Pulsar
NGC 869 and NGC 884 - The two open clusters of the Double Cluster in Perseus

Speaking of Perseus ....
I tried looking up alpha Persei aka Mirfak -- Neither search produced a result. ... Algol however does. Same with many other stars. It's very inconsistent which named stars are searchable by their name or designation. Except the Hipparcos catalog. And seriously, only hardcore research scientists use that designation. (Same with Tycho, UCAC, NOMAD, etc)

EDIT: Sorry about the typo on "add." I can find no way to change that now that I've submitted the thread. D'OH!

 

[CMDR Saigon]

Great idea CMDR! Most places I go to in game on exploration, I try to cross reference real life facts and often it takes a little while to search as not all catalogues are used or listed or uniform standards use within the game.