News on the ASE
The All Skies Encyclopaedia (ASE) has been crawled by several search engines and AI-chatbots, which means it is becoming a standard reference, even feeding google search engine, chat-GPT, claude.ai, perplexity.ai and other common tools to provide their replies.
In July and August, the ASE as been crawled so heavily that it became very slow or even unavailable, as the crawler accesses hit the CPU load limits.
Other academic databases, websites and repositories currently face or have been facing similar issues, e.g.:
| ASE crawlers: | |
|---|---|
| Organization | Crawler / User-Agent |
| OpenAI | GPTBot |
| OpenAI | OAI-SearchBot |
| OpenAI | ChatGPT-User |
| Anthropic | ClaudeBot |
| Amazon | Amazonbot |
| Semrush | SemrushBot |
| Meta | meta-webindexer |
| Meta | meta-externalagent |
Planetarium Babylonicum of the ASE approaching maturity
We proudly announce the compilation of material from Greek antiquity – and the continual addition of new material from ancient China (which is still incomplete). The sub-project “Planetarium Babylonicum” is approaching maturity: all historical terms have been included, but we keep reworking and updating the material. The initial material has been provided by the books by Felix Gössmann (1950) and Gennady Kurtik (2007).
In June 2026, two initial notes appeared in the academic newsletter
Nouvelles Assyriologiques Brèves et Utilitaires:
| 2026/083 p. 141-143 | Hoffmann, S. & Horowitz, W | Announcing Planetarium Babylonicum 2.0 Sciences (hors textes): médecine, astronomie etc. ; Publications |
| 2026/082 p. 140-141 | Hoffmann, S. & Horowitz, W. & Hunger, H | Translating Terms in Astral Science Sciences (hors textes): médecine, astronomie etc. ; Lexicographie |
Planetarium Graecum of the ASE approaching maturity
The ASE is still under construction. Some news since we moved to our own (new) server in January 2026:
- In January, the general introductions of the 88 IAU-constellations have been added. They are largely updated content found in the books by WGSN members Ian Ridpath and Susanne M Hoffmann.
- We got the permission to upload our high resolution images of the Kugel Globe, Paris: kind permission by Alexis and Nicolas Kugel.
- With kind permission by Jordi Pamias, we added English translations of the (Pseudo)-Eratosthenes “Katasterismoy” (Pamias and Zucker 2015) and the according identifications (star catalogue) by Susanne M Hoffmann, which were based on the earlier edition and translation by Pamias and Geus (2007).
- With kind permission by Eric Glover, we also added the reconstructed stars from Hipparchus’s lost star catalogue that he printed constellation-wise in his new book (Glover 2026).
- The constellation-wise star catalogue of Ptolemy’s Almagest is given from the edition by Heiberg (1892) and its English translation by Toomer (1984, rev. 1997).
