SIMBAD

"For the missile mounting, see Mistral missile"

SIMBAD (the Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data) is an astronomical database of objects beyond the Solar system. It is maintained by the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), France.

SIMBAD was created by merging the Catalog of Stellar Identifications (CSI) and the Bibliographic Star Index as they existed at the Meudon Computer Centre until 1979, and then expanded by additional source data from other catalogues and the academic literature. The first on-line interactive version, known as Version 2, was made available in 1981. Version 3, developed in the C language and running on UNIX stations at the Strasbourg Observatory, was released in 1990. Fall of 2006 saw the release of Version 4 of the database, now stored in PostgresQL, and the supporting software, now written entirely in Java.

As of 14 June 2007, SIMBAD contains information for 3,824,195 objects under 11,200,785 different names, with 209,451 bibliographical references and 5,455,841 bibliographic citations.

An asteroid, 4692 SIMBAD (mp|1983 VM|7) is named in its honour.

ee also

* NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) - a database of information on solar system objects, maintained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
* NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) - a database of information on objects outside the Milky Way, also maintained by JPL.

External links

* [http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad.html SIMBAD]
* [http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad Web interface]