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In radio astronomy, many common objects are refered to by their designation from the 3rd Cambridge Catalogue of Radio Sources, e.g. 3C 353.

For hobbyist purposes, I would like to create a catalogue for Cartes du Ciel that shows the location of the 3C objects. However, the catalogue exists in three versions, 3C from 1959 being the original, and 3CR (1962) and 3CRR (1983) updating the original.

Later surveys at different frequency bands used similar designations, e.g. 4C, 5C and so on.

Looking at the databases linked above, however, it seems that both only list the updates to the original catalogue (e.g. 3C 353 is listed in neither of them). Is there a digitized, comprehensive catalogue of all 3C objects? Or, even better, is there an archive where I could combine entries from several C surveys based on, say, 21cm flux?

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  • $\begingroup$ BTW: I do realize that there are many more modern catalogues available, but I am especially interested in 3C because its designations are so widely used. $\endgroup$
    – jstarek
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 10:33
  • $\begingroup$ That page is telling you that 3C 353 is also known as 2C 1473, 3CR 353, 4C -00.67, etc, etc, etc. So, it exists in about 40 different catalogs with different names. $\endgroup$
    – eshaya
    Commented Jan 2, 2018 at 2:17

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You can use VizieR to retrieve the whole catalogue (3C and revised 3C).

VizieR is an online astronomical catalogue that allows you to access a quite comprehensive list of catalogues (16,929, as of today); you can easily query and extract all kind of data from this online tool.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for that, I had the feeling that VizieR (or SIMBAD, for that matter) were somewhat "secondary sources". But you're right, that's possibly the most practical approach to getting all the data. $\endgroup$
    – jstarek
    Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 13:47
  • $\begingroup$ Well, all CDS services were designed to simplify astronomers' life, trying to gather as much data as possible in one place... and if you want to work with heterogenous data (coming from different catalogues, in different wavelengths and so on) I don't know anything more practical. On top of that, you can query easily VizieR with libraries as astropy, now widely used in the community. $\endgroup$
    – MBR
    Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 14:53
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You should use 3CRR. It contains a few sources of large angular diameter that were missed in the original surveys.

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