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Magellanic Catalog of Stars

Published by High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center | National Aeronautics and Space Administration | Metadata Last Checked: February 14, 2026 | Last Modified: 2026-02-10
The Magellanic Catalogue of Stars (MACS) is based on scans of ESO Schmidt plates and contains about 244,000 stars covering large areas around the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The positions refer to the FK5 system via the PPM Catalog. A comparison of positions from different plates shows internal errors at a level of 0.15 to o.23 arcseconds; the positional accuracy is estimated to be better than 0.5 arcseconds for 99% of the stars. The limiting blue magnitude of the MACS is less than 16.5 magnitudes, but the catalog is not complete to this level, as only those stars are included which are undisturbed by close neighbors as verified by visual (interactive) screening (in order to obtain a clean astrometric reference). This database table was created at the HEASARC in June 1998 based on the ADC/<a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/I/221">CDS Catalog I/221</a>. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

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