- 1800 BC – Babylonian star catalog
- 350 BC – Shin Shen’s star catalog has almost 800 entries
- 134 BC – Hipparchus makes a detailed star map
- ca. 140 – Ptolemy completes his Almagest, which contains a catalog of
stars, observations of planetary motions, and treatises on geometry and
cosmology - 840 – al-Farghani Compendium of the Science of the Stars
- 963 – al-Sufi’s star catalog Book of the Fixed Stars
- 1252-72 – Alphonsine tables recorded
- 1437 – Publication of Ulugh Beg’s Zij-i-Sultani
- late 16th century – Tycho Brahe updates Ptolemy’s Almagest
- 1603 – Johann Bayer’s Uranometria
- 1678 – Edmund Halley publishes a catalog of 341 southern stars—first
systematic southern sky survey - 1726 – Posthumous publication of John Flamsteed’s Historia Coelestis
Britannica - 1771 – Charles Messier publishes his first list of nebulae
- 1862 – Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander publishes his final edition of the
Bonner Durchmusterung catalog of stars north of declination -1Ą. - 1864 – John Herschel publishes the General Catalog of nebulae and star
clusters - 1887 – Paris conference institutes Carte du Ciel project to map entire
sky to 14th mag photographically - 1890 – John Dreyer publishes the New General Catalog of nebulae and
star clusters - 1932 – Harlow Shapley and Adelaide Ames publish “A Survey of the
External Galaxies Brighter than the Thirteenth Magnitude”, later known
as the Shapley-Ames Catalog - 1956 – Completion of the Palomar sky survey with the Palomar 48-inch
Schmidt optical reflecting telescope - 1962 – A.S. Bennett publishes the Revised 3C Catalog of 328 radio
sources - 1965 – Gerry Neugebauer and Robert Leighton begin a 2.2 micron sky
survey with a 1.6-meter telescope on Mount Wilson - 1982 – IRAS space observatory completes an all-sky mid-infrared survey
- 1990 – Publication of APM Galaxy Survey of 2+ million galaxies, to
study Large-scale structure of the cosmos - 1991 – ROSAT space observatory begins an all-sky X-ray survey
- 1993 – Start of the 20 cm VLA FIRST survey
- 1998 – Sloan Digital Sky Survey commences
- 2003 – 2dF Survey of Galaxy redshifts published
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