• Helou, G.
;
• Madore, B. F.
;
• Schmitz, M.
;
• Wu, X.
;
• Corwin, H. G., Jr.
;
• Lague, C.
;
• Bennett, J.
;
• Sun, H.

Abstract

The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) is an electronic research tool which provides powerful access to published multi-wavelength data on extragalactic objects. It consists of a computer database with a broad range of published information, and a user interface which allows fast and flexible retrieval of the information via the Internet. NED is an object-oriented database and represents the systematic merger of more than 40 major astronomical catalogs, as well as scores of shorter lists culled from the refereed literture. New lists and catalogs are continually folded in, based on cross-identifications for each object. As per November 1994, the Object Directory contained about 330,000 objects known by 650,000 names.