Timeline of astronomical maps, catalogs, and surveys

• 1800 BC - Babylonian star catalog
• 350 BC - Shin Shen's star catalog has almost 800 entries
• 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
• 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 mag 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 publishes the Revised 3C Catalog 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
• 1998 - Sloan Digital Sky Survey commences
• 2003 - 2dF Survey of Galaxy redshifts published; 2MASS completes