The Meade ETX's Autostar uses the Yale Bright Star Catalog as its primary star database. This has been revised since it was originally compiled, and the new editions are called the Harvard Revised Bright Star Catalog (HR, or BSC).

Meade probably used automated methods to cull the catalog for the subset that's in the Autostars. There are some accidental mis-namings which point to that.

One of the problems with the Autostar's database is that, although it is derived from the BSC, and contains many cross references to entries in it, you cannot access the database given the HR numbers.

To address that, I've taken a copy of the BSC available at
ftp://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/adc/archives/5/5050/
and culled and sorted it for three things:

• The HR number itself
• The SAO number, which you can use in the Autostar
• The name, or Bayer/Flamsteed Designation (Alp Cet, for example)

The files are:

• hr-sao.txt sorted by HR, giving name and SAO. 9110 entries, 222 Kbytes.
• sao-hr.txt sorted by SAO, giving name and HR. 9110 entries, 222 Kbytes.
• const-hr-sao.txt sorted by Constellation, giving HR and SAO. 3159 entries, 77 Kbytes.
• named-hr-sao.txt sorted by HR, giving name and SAO 3159 entries, 77 Kbytes.
• named-sao-hr.txt sorted by SAO, giving name and HR. 3159 entries, 77 Kbytes.
• hr-named.txt sorted by HR, giving the first line of the BSC's NAME comments. 23 KBytes

These files contain more entries than the Autostar does.
Why and which stars Meade chose to omit I cannot guess.
I'm just aware of a few I've tried to access, which aren't there.

And these files say nothing about the Autostar's Deep Sky catalogs...

Enjoy!
-dick seymour
rseymour@wolfenet.com