Poster Abstracts

Name/Affiliation:  Angelle Tanner (Mississippi State University)

Title:  An Open Catalog of Nearby Stars

Abstract:
Ironically, while astronomers are quite good at collecting multiple data points about any given star - temperature, composition, size, rotational velocity, mass, distance, etc. - we are still bad at organizing all that data into one cohesive, user-friendly archive. There are on-line stellar catalogs like SIMBAD, however, this archive suffers from inaccuracies (Stauffer et al. 2010) and lacks critical information relevant to exoplanet searches like rotational velocity, composition and multiplicity. The NASA Star and Exoplanet Database, was shuttered due to funding issues, was not user-friendly (there was no batch mode) and was slow to ingest public data due to strict formatting requirements. I propose to develop a group edited on-line archive of the physical and observational properties of all stars within 100 light years. The archive will allow you to download all the data for a list of stars (batch mode) and for stars of a given property (rank mode). The archive will utilize existing plotting tools. Most importantly, the archive will follow the model of the Kepler Community Follow Up Program and the Open Exoplanet Catalogue and allow users to contribute ancillary data, images and spectra themselves! The archive team will populate the majority of the initial data from SIMBAD, NStED and large published surveys like RECONS but then we will encourage authors to contribute to the archive under the supervision of the archive team. Like the Kepler CFOP, all data will be included in the archive with the most agreed on values flagged by the community. It is this community policing and data entry aspect that will be key in giving us an unprecedented picture of the stars in our stellar neighborhood as well as critical a tool for all future exoplanet searches.