This week, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) published a catalog of 227 official star names. The list was published in order to standardize names and to cut down on confusion when referencing constellations, since each one has had various monikers in Greek, Roman, Chinese, Arabic and many other languages throughout history.

Although the IAU has attempted to provide a brief history of the cataloguing of the stars on their website as an accompaniement to the new catalog, the association begins with the western astronomers of the European Renaissance; crediting Johann Bayer's Uranometria atlas of 1603 as the first such popular catalog. This in fact omits the pivotal contributions of a number of medieval scholars to the information science of cataloguing the stars.

The earliest known cataloguer (as opposed to just mapping) of the stars in the West is Hipparchos of Nikaia (c.190-126 BCE). He is credited as the inventor of trigonometry, but also began to measure the night sky using instruments like the dioptra (Gr.διόπτρα, a surveying instrument for the stars) and perhaps the armillary astrolabe. He compiled and indexed many previous astral readings of the night sky. He was one of a number of Hellenistic astronomers following the period of expansion and subjugation under Alexander the Great who were fascinated by the act of enumerating and cataloguing the stars. The most famous of these astronomers, Ptolemy, wrote the Almagest. This work established the need for astronomical tables which then allowed for the calculation of the positions of the planets, eclipses and the setting of the calendar.

One explanation for this Hellenistic era celestial obsession is offered by ancient Greek historian Graham Shipley, who notes, "The desire to catalogue and name the heavens may be seen as part of a larger ideological project...coloured by a desire to identify and symbolically appropriate the peoples and lands with which they came into contact." In other words, the very act of cataloguing was an argument of dominance. It could serve as a gesture of imperialism to have informational command over the heavens.

The cataloguing work of Hellenistic astronomers had a great impact on the medieval Muslim world. As Marika Sardar, a curator of Islamic Art now at the San Diego Museum of Art, noted, "Between the eighth and tenth centuries, Baghdad was a major center of study under the Abbasid caliphs al-Mansur (r. 754–75) and al-Ma’mun (r. 813–33)...At this time, scientists translated studies in Sanskrit, Pahlavi, and Greek into Arabic, and, for the first time, recorded Arab Bedouin traditions." Claudius Ptolemy's works were translated and studied by these scientists as well. Notably, such observatories included both Muslim academics and Jewish ones, such as the 9th century Sahl (Abu 'Uthman) ibn Bishr.

The intellectual debt we owe to medieval Muslim astronomers is great. A few years ago, an exceptional book was published by cartographical historian Elly Dekker. Called Illustrating the Phaenomena: Celestial Cartography in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, she notes the astronomical tables revised and codified within the Baghdad astronomical observatories active from the 9th to the early 10th century. The pivotal Al-Zij al-Mumtahan (the validated astronomical table) was then assembled by the astronomer Al-Battānī (Lat. Albategnius). He notably lists 533 stars and determined the length of the solar year. Turns out that he was only a couple of minutes off the mark. The Bodleian Libraries’ have now digitized a 12th-century copy of a work by notable Muslim astronomer ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Ṣūfī’. It is called Book of Fixed Stars and was a popular illustrated treatise written in Arabic (via Digital Bodleian and Fihrist).

Astronomers and cartographers writing in Arabic are an oft-overlooked group, but so are the female medieval cosmographers. The best known of the Middle Ages is likely Hildegard of Bingen, a German abbess at a Benedictine monastery, who worked throughout the 12th century. She wrote works on cosmology which she then attributed to divine inspiration (what a modest nun!). Her drawings of the seasons and of the animals blowing the winds onto the earth's surface (e.g. a lobster) are a reminder that mapping--whether accurate or not--is still an act of understanding. Similarly, there were elite women like Sophia Brahe, a Danish astronomer of the 16th and early 17th century who lived in the shadow of her more famous brother, Tycho. Sophia was a voracious reader of German and Latin who contributed to the early modern scientific revolution.

Heading into the early modern era, interest in mapping of the heavens indeed took off. The printing press made maps of the stars more accessible and widely circulated than ever, and new technologies like the telescope, invented around 1608, continued to fuel the celestial craze. One of the most famed of the celestial cartographers was Jesuit mathematician named Ignace Gaston Pardies, whose star atlas was published a year after his death: one in 1674 and another edition in 1693 and 1700.

The multi-cultural history of cataloguing and mapping the stars says a lot about every civilization's interest in understanding the celestial sphere on their own terms and in their own language. Information science and the intentional act of organizing places we cannot visit then provide us with a means of control--even if we have none. The IAU's new standardized list of star names then enshrines part of the rich history of astronomy through language, but we should also remember the myriad men and women who wished to catalog the heavens with their own terms.