Göttingen actinometry

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The Göttingen actinometry is a star catalog that was created in Göttingen at the turn of the century , the main content of which is the highly precisely measured star brightness . Instead of the term actinometry , a brightness catalog is used today .

This catalog published by the Göttingen observatory in 1910 contains 3,500 stars from the Bonn survey in a 20 ° wide declination zone from the celestial equator up to + 20 °. The brightnesses were determined photographically , i.e. H. by precisely measuring the blackening of the stars recorded on special photo plates . The basic theory for this method was developed shortly beforehand by the astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, who worked in Göttingen .

Around the same time, the Yerkes Actinometry for the declination range 60 ° to 75 ° was developed in the USA . The division of these and other zone catalogs took place in advance among the observatories and later led to special calibration fields with which the brightness catalogs were uniformly reduced (calibrated). The most important of these calibration fields was the International Pole Sequence published in 1922 .

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