![]() These positions were taken from the catalog of Tycho Brahe's circulated manuscript prior to its 1602 publication. Further innovations in this work include each plate having a carefully engraved grid, so that star positions can be read off to fractions of a degree. To provide an example of the system at work, the name of the brightest star in the constellation Taurus is now known as Alpha Tauri, with the second brightest star being Beta Tauri, and so forth. These letters were placed on the charts themselves, and also in a table that accompanied each chart. ![]() The resulting names persist to the present day (replacing Piccolomini's 1540 naming convention) and were of great help in standardizing the practice of astronomy. In this system, the brightest stars were denoted with Greek letters, and the dimmest stars given Roman lettering. Bayer introduced a new system of stellar nomenclature which used Greek and Roman letters to denote relative brightness in each constellation. ![]() ![]() The work was important for a number of reasons. Bayer's constellation figures are based on the work of Jacobo de Gheyn. The atlas contained fifty-one star-charts, including forty-eight charts of the Ptolemaic constellations and two charts of the hemispheres.
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