Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscript no. verbunt c ESO 2021 July 12, 2021 Early star catalogues of the southern sky⋆ De Houtman, Kepler (Second and Third Classes), and Halley Frank Verbunt1,2 and Robert H. van Gent3,4 1 Astronomical Institute, Utrecht University, PO Box 80 000, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands; e-mail:
[email protected] 2 SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, Sorbonnelaan 2, 3584 CA Utrecht, The Netherlands 3 until Jan 2010: URU-Explokart, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, PO Box 80 115, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands 4 Institute for the History and Foundations of Science, PO Box 80 000, 3508 TA Utrecht, The Netherlands; e-mail:
[email protected] Received February 27, 2011 / Accepted April 5, 2011 ABSTRACT De Houtman in 1603, Kepler in 1627 and Halley in 1679 published the earliest modern catalogues of the southern sky. We provide machine-readable versions of these catalogues, make some comparisons between them, and briefly discuss their accuracy on the basis of comparison with data from the modern Hipparcos Catalogue. We also compare our results for De Houtman with those by Knobel (1917) finding good overall agreement. About half of the ∼200 new stars (with respect to Ptolemaios) added by De Houtman are in twelve new constellations, half in old constellations like Centaurus, Lupus and Argo. The right ascensions and declinations given by De Houtman have error distributions with widths of about 40′, the longitudes and latitudes given by Kepler have error distributions with widths of about 45′. Halley improves on this by more than an order of magnitude to widths of about 3′, and all entries in his catalogue can be identified.