starhash 1.1.0

Generate unique, memorable, and deterministic names for astronomical objects.

StarHash

Generate unique, memorable, and deterministic names for astronomical objects.

Why?

Because modern astronomy is hard enough, without mixing up sequentially-generated object names. Assigning memorable names to objects not only minimises the chance of triggering precious telescope time on the wrong thing, but reduces cognitive load.

Every 3 arcsecond patch of sky now has a unique 3-word combination associated with it!

Example

• Instead of SN2024cld or ra=237.589792 dec=+18.93895
• You get: armrest-fraying-bullion

Installation

To avoid issues with dependencies, we recommend setting up a virtual environment using your favourite package manager. Then:

pip install starhash

or with uv

uv add starhash

Quickstart

StarHash ships a basic CLI for quick queries by default

starhash get-name-from-coord --ra=321.4214 --dec=-54.21231

starhash get-coord-from-name gathering-equinox-approach

Pre-computed catalogs

This repo also hosts a minimal set of pre-computed name mappings between existing catalogues/name registries and their new starhash name, for those who want to explore without installing anything.

The Transient Name Server and NASA Exoplanet Archive lists are located under paper/data and are distributed as .csv files with gzip compression.

Direct links

nasa_exoplanet_archive_starhashed.csv.gz tns_public_objects_starhashed.csv.gz

Development and contributing

git clone https://github.com/tkillestein/starhash.git

Then create the dev environment:

uv sync --all-groups --python>=3.11

Install the pre-commit hooks

pre-commit install

And you're ready to go!

Before committing any changes, run pytest to confirm that the hashing code still satisfies the round-trip property.

Documentation is built via mkdocs - add Markdown files to docs and edit the mkdocs.yml file to build pages there. Then commit and push your changes, and run mkdocs gh-deploy to update the documentations site.

Citation

If you include StarHash in your favourite pipeline/broker/API, please cite:

@software{starhash,
  author = {Tom Killestein},
  title = {StarHash: Human-readable identifiers for astronomical coordinates},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/tkillestein/starhash}
}