Tycho Brahe completed his catalogue with the positions and magnitudes of 1004
fixed stars in 1598. This catalogue circulated in manuscript form. Brahe edited
a shorter version with 777 stars, printed in 1602, and Kepler edited the full
catalogue of 1004 stars, printed in 1627. We provide machine-readable versions
of the three versions of the catalogue, describe the differences between them
and briefly discuss their accuracy on the basis of comparison with modern data
from the Hipparcos Catalogue. We also compare our results with earlier analyses
by Dreyer (1916) and Rawlins (1993), finding good overall agreement. The
magnitudes given by Brahe correlate well with modern values, his longitudes and
latitudes have error distributions with widths of about 2 arcmin, with excess
numbers of stars with larger errors (as compared to Gaussian distributions), in
particular for the faintest stars. Errors in positions larger than 10 arcmin,
which comprise about 15 per cent of the entries, are likely due to computing or
copying errors.Comment: Accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysics; 24 pages; 63 figures; 3
machine readable tables made available at CD
