What is an HIP star? I have this program with most stars in the night sky and a lot of them are HIP125729 etc.

Question

The stars seem to be more smaller ones and none of the major ones.

Answer 1

Check up whether they are 'stars' of the performing arts!

Answer 2

The class of brightness.

Answer 3

HIP means that the star is part of the catalogue created from data of the ESA astrometry mission Hipparcos.

Hipparcos (for High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite) operated from 1989 to 1993 and was dedicated to the measurement of stellar parallax and the proper motions of stars.

It catalogued over 118,000 stars to a very high degree of position accuracy.

Answer 4

HIP stands for Hipparchus, which is a satellite that I think ESA put up - it wasn't 's**y' enough for NASA.  It measured the 'peculiar velocity' of stars - not just how they were moving around the galaxy, but what other ways they were moving as well.  These other velocities is what will make the sky look different a few million years later.  They tend to be the dimmer stars because the ones that are easy to measure velocity changes for are the nearby stars, and there are a lot more small dim stars in the galaxy than big bright stars.

Answer 5

from the hipparcos catalogue.

Answer 6

It is a star discovered and measured by the satellite Hipparcos and mentioned only in the star catalog of the same name.