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This field allows you to search for articles which focus on a specific object. You can use any of the three following types of designations to search in this field.
| Name based acronyms | LMC is an acronym for the Large Magellanic Cloud. Objects in
constellations such as R Sct. appear with the IAU-approved three-letter
abbreviation for the constellation. |
| Catalogue based acronyms | A designation containing an acronym for the catalogue
followed by the catalogue entry number. This number may be sequential,
such as NGC 204 or it may represent an approximate location in the sky,
usually in terms of right ascension and declination (such as PSR 1913+16)
or Galactic coordinates (e.g. G 345.01+1.79) |
| Positional information only | For example: 013022+30233 |
This search field is particularly useful because you do not have to type out the entire name of an object and, depending on the identifier, it can eliminate a great deal of unrelated articles and allows you to search Identifiers that appear to contain stop words, such as And X. . Take, for example, BY Camelopardalis.
Sample search
If you search by the identifier "by cam" in topic you get almost 20,000 records. Looking at results they are engineering related articles, not astronomical.
In addition, the "by" portion is not searched because it is listed in the INSPEC Help as a stopword. This can be seen by searching only "cam", which has the same number of results as the previous search.
Now we forget "by" and search just "Camelopardalis" in the topic field, hoping we have spelled it correctly, and we have significantly reduced the number of articles and focused in on astronomy, but there are still quite a few.
Instead of struggling to spell "Camelopardalis" or sifting through hundreds or thousands of articles, the Astronomical object search will improve the ease of your search.
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Photo of Titan by NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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