The star catalogue in Seonggyeong - Comparison with the modern Hipparcos Catalogue

In 1861 Nam Byeong-Gil published a book called as "Seonggyeong" which contains a star catalogue (NBGC) with the positions, magnitudes, and star maps for 1449 stars. The NBGC lists only the traditional Chinese stars selected from "the sequel to the Qing Dynasty Star Catalogue and Star Map." To identify each star from the NBGC with modern counterpart, we correct the positions of the Hipparcos stars brighter than 6.5 mag for proper motion, then precess the coordinates to the epoch of the NBGC. For each star in the NBGC, we find the nearest counterpart in the Hipparcos Catalogue (HC). If a much brighter star is at a slightly larger angular distance, we select that star as the secure counterpart. As a result, 95.5% of the stars in the NBGC were identified. We find a very good overall agreement of our results with a previous analysis by Ahn et al. (1996, Journal of the Korean History of Science Society, vol. I). For securely identified stars, we analyse its accuracy on the basis of comparison with data from the HC. The correlation of the errors between right ascensions and declinations is significantly deviated from spherical distribution. The magnitudes recorded in the NBGC correlate well with modern values. The accuracy of position decreases slowly with magnitude. Right ascensions and declinations have error distributions with ${\sigma}$ = 2.0' for the former while the latter with ${\sigma}$ = 1.6', but with much more errors >5' than expected for a Gaussian distribution.