Carte du Ciel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Carte du Ciel (Map of the Sky) was an international project to determine the positions of some millions of stars -- that is to say, of all stars to the 11th or 12th magnitude. It was begun in 1887 by Paris Observatory director Amédée Mouchez, using photographic plates and vast numbers of unskilled women workers to measure them. Decades of labour was expended internationally before the project was superseded by modern astronomical techniques. Although the project was never completed, a catalogue was published in 1958.
