History
The celestial coordinates of Lalande 21185 were first published in 1801 by French astronomer Jérôme Lalande of the Paris Observatory in the star catalog, Histoire Céleste Française. The catalog sequence numbers for all of the observed stars, including this one, were added to the original catalog by a later editor in an 1847 republication. Today this star, along with a few others, is still commonly referred to by its Lalande catalog number.
Winneke is reported to have made the first measurement of the star's parallax of .511 arc seconds in 1856 and thus first identifying Lalande 21185 as the second-closest known star to the Sun, after the Alpha Centauri system. Since that time better measurements have placed the star further away but it was the still the second-closest known star system until the discovery of two dim red dwarf stars, Wolf 359 and Barnard's Star, in the early twentieth century using astrophotography.
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