STAR, in astronomy, a general name for all the heavenly bodies which are dispersed throughout the whole heavens.
The stars are distinguished from the phenomena of their motion, &c. into fix ed and erratic or wandering stars ; these last are again distinguished into the great er luminaries, viz. the Sun and Moon ; the planets, and the comets; each where of has been fully considered and explain ed, under their respective articles. See Sew, Moor, &c.
As to the fixed stars, or simple stars, they are so called, because they seem to be fixed, or perfectly at rest, and conse quently appear always at the same dis tance from each other.
An observer will first divide these stars into several classes, according to the splendour of their light ; the brightest he will call stars of the first magnitude; those of the next inferior light, he will call stars of the second magnitude ; and so in order to those which can barely be seen by the naked eye, which are called stars of the sixth magnitude ; and those which cannot be seen but by the help of magnifying glasses are of the seventh, eighth, &c. magnitudes. Afterward. to avoid confusion, and to be able to point out any one star, without being obliged to give a particular name to each, he will divide them into separate parcels, of which he will make a particular plan; and to each of these constellations, or parcels of stars, he will assign a figure at pleasure, as that of a Ram, a Bull, a Dra gon, a Hercules, &c. but so that all the stars in each of the parcels, drawn in the plan, may be enclosed in the designed figures, and correspond to the different parts from whence they take their name; for example, having drawn the figure of a bull about a parcel, or constellation of stars, that star which falls in the eye will be called the star in the Bull's Eye, or simply the Bull's Eye ; another, which respects the tip of one horn, will be named the Bull's Horn ; and so of others. A parcel of stars thus contained in any assigned figure is called a con stellation. By this means, notwithstand ing the seeming impossibility of number ing the fixed stars, their relative situa tions one to another have been so care fully observed by astronomers, that they have not only been able to number them, but even to distinguish the place of each star irr the heavens, and that with greater accuracy than any geographer could ever point out the situations of the several cities or towns upon the surface of the earth ; and not only the places of those few, if they may be so called, which are to be seen with the naked eye, have been pointed out and registered by them, but even of those which are discovered only by the telescope. The most ancient ob
servations of the stars, which have reach ed these times, were made by Timo charis and Aristillus, about 300 years be fore Christ. The next after them, who made a catalogue of the stars visible to the naked eye, and registered their places, was Hipparchus of Rhodes ; he flourished about 120 years before Christ, and numbered 1022 stars. After him, Ptolemy enlarged his catalogue to 1026: Ulug Beigh, the grandfather of Tamer lane the Great, about the year 1437, con structed a new catalogue, more exact than that of Ptolemy, containing 1017 stars : Tycho, in the year 1600, determin ed the places of 777 fixed stars, and re duced them to a catalogue; Kepler's ca talogue contained 1163 stars; and that of the Prince of Hesse, 400 ; Ricciolus enlarged Kepler's catalogue to 1468; and John Bayer, a German, had described the places of 1725 stars ; after this, about 1670, Hevelius of Dsntzic composed a catalogue of 1888 fixed stars; Dr. Halley also undertook a voyage to the island of St. Helena, in order to take the position of the stars within the antarctic circle, of which he published a catalogue, contain ing 373 stars; but the largest and most complete catalogue ever yet published, is that of our accurate astronomer, Mr. Flamsteed, in his Celestial History, which contains nearly 3000 stars ; all whose places are more exactly determined in the heavens, than the position of cities and other places on the earth.