The VSX has been recently amended, and now include more than 8 millions stars.
Still, the Simbad/Vizier version is an old one, which include only 2.12 millions of variable stars.
Since this Simbad/Vizier database is used as main source for finding variable stars in popular planetarium softwares like popular Patrick Chevalley’s Cartes Du Ciel (Skychart), and others, I was wondering if an amended version of the whole VSX in Simbad/Vizier was planned. Any news about this ?
The version of VSX at VizieR is from 2025 Jan 13, and thus not so “old”. The CDS folks work very hard at keeping up-to-date with things, but it is the proverbial problem of drinking from a firehose: vast amounts of data coming in. Sebastian can surely say more authoritatively, but it may take a couple weeks for things to be updated at VizieR, and that’s if things go smoothly! VSX gets about 20,000 hits per day at VizieR, one of the very most-used catalogues, so the CDS is well aware of how valuable the file is to the community worldwide. Sebastian Otero has done an astounding job of keeping the thing going!
The AAVSO sends Vizier updates to VSX on a weekly basis. The team at Vizier chooses when to issue an update. Typically it is every 3 weeks, but sometimes it can take a month or more depending on their availability.
As both Brians have mentioned, the file is updated every two or three weeks, but that depends on the VizieR team availability.
I have checked if everything was okay at our end and it is, and I have sent a note to the VizieR folks just in case. It’s going to be 5 weeks without udates, and that is a little longer than what we are used to.
It will probably be available in a few days.
And we still have more than 1 million stars to add in the days to come, so soon VSX will have more than 10 miilion stars catalogued.
People who want to better characterize all these new variables will have plenty of potential projects to undertake in the future (that’s a positive way of looking at things )
Aha !
Many thanks for the replies !
I understand that this is not an easy task to maintain at a level close to perfection all this stuff. Many people are involved in this work, at AAVSO and CDS at Strasbourg, Gaia consortium ./…
I’m very surprise that the VSX gain so many hits each day, but surely, this is one - if not the ONE - of the most useful basic catalogue in astrophysic.
Well, very very good jod !
I’m currently downloading the new database, which weight about 317 Mo (the latest was “only” 80 Mo).
Hi Marc,
We have disabled the star counter in VSX because it was consuming too many resources.
We’ll see if it can be turnd back on, but the number of stars is indeed approximately what you see in VizieR.
Actually the number is smaller now because these days we are working in removing duplicates, something that cross-identifying Gaia with the existing VSX stars has allowed us to find.
So we actually have <200 stars in the total count now (and there are around 400 to remove yet).
have mentioned, the file is updated every two or three weeks, but that depends on the VizieR team availability.