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'Timeline of astronomical maps, catalogs and surveys'

★ 1800 BC - Babylonian star catalog

★ 350 BC - Shin Shen's star catalog has almost 800 entries

★ 300 BC - star catalog of Timocharis of Alexandria

★ 134 BC - Hipparchus makes a detailed star map

★ ca. 140 - Ptolemy completes his ''Almagest'', which contains a catalog of stars, observations of planetary motions, and treatises on geometry and cosmology

★ 840 - al-Farghani ''Compendium of the Science of the Stars''

★ 963 - al-Sufi's star catalog ''Book of the Fixed Stars''

★ 1252-1272 - Alphonsine tables recorded

★ 1395 - Cheonsang Yeolcha Bunyajido star map created at the order of King Taejo

★ 1437 - Publication of Ulugh Beg's ''Zij-i-Sultani''

★ late 16th century - Tycho Brahe updates Ptolemy's ''Almagest''

★ 1603 - Johann Bayer's ''Uranometria''

★ 1678 - Edmund Halley publishes a catalog of 341 southern stars, the first systematic southern sky survey

★ 1726 - Posthumous publication of John Flamsteed's ''Historia Coelestis Britannica''

★ 1771 - Charles Messier publishes his first list of nebulae

★ 1862 - Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander publishes his final edition of the ''Bonner Durchmusterung'' catalog of stars north of declination -1°.

★ 1864 - John Herschel publishes the ''General Catalogue'' of nebulae and star clusters

★ 1887 - Paris conference institutes ''Carte du Ciel'' project to map entire sky to 14th magnitude photographically

★ 1890 - John Dreyer publishes the ''New General Catalogue'' of nebulae and star clusters

★ 1932 - Harlow Shapley and Adelaide Ames publish ''A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter than the Thirteenth Magnitude'', later known as the ''Shapley-Ames Catalog''

★ 1950-1957 - Completion of the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS) with the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt optical reflecting telescope. Actual date quoted varies upon source.

★ 1962 - A.S. Bennett of the Cambridge Radio Astronomy Group publishes the Revised 3C Catalogue of 328 radio sources

★ 1965 - Gerry Neugebauer and Robert Leighton begin a 2.2 micrometre sky survey with a 1.6-meter telescope on Mount Wilson

★ 1982 - IRAS space observatory completes an all-sky mid-infrared survey

★ 1990 - Publication of APM Galaxy Survey of 2+ million galaxies, to study Large-scale structure of the cosmos

★ 1991 - ROSAT space observatory begins an all-sky X-ray survey

★ 1993 - Start of the 20 cm VLA FIRST survey

★ 1997 - Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) commences, first version of Hipparcos Catalogue published

★ 1998 - Sloan Digital Sky Survey commences

★ 2003 - 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey published; 2MASS completes