Zodiacal Catalog
The Zodiacal Catalog or ZC is a star catalog for 3,539 stars near the ecliptic.
It was created by the American astronomer James Robertson and published in 1940. It is mainly used for star coverings by the moon or (less often) by planets. The catalog includes stars up to 9th magnitude in the sky zone just under 6 ° on both sides of the ecliptic, whose positions on the USNO were determined by meridian circle measurements 1928–1930 and reduced to the equinox 1950.0.
Due to the high precision of occultation observations from around 1900, more precise star locations could be measured than with all methods developed up to then. The discovery of very close binary stars and even the measurement of star diameters is possible.
A modern, much larger star catalog for this purpose is the USNO-SA2.0 with around 50 million stars.