RE: starship-design: charts

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

Mike writes:
 > >Since such a chart would have to be in three dimensions, I don't
 > >know of any easy pictorial representation.
 > 
 > How many stars are we talking about here?  If it were small enough, one could
 > use VRML I would imagine.  That would be nifty.

A database of stars that are either within 100 parsecs or with
apparent magnitudes of 6 or less comes to over 25,000 entries.
I'm reducing the HIPPARCOS data to 3-d coordinates (determined
from right ascension, declination, and parallax), estimated mass,
estimated radius, absolute magnitude, and surface temperature.
This data file, which also includes distance from Earth and
uncertainty in distance, is over 2 megabytes in size.  The
HIPPARCOS catalog has data on approximately 100,000 stars total;
the Tycho catalog has around 1,000,000.

Reducing the catalog to just stars visible from Earth (less 5th
or 6th apparent magnitude) would probably total a few thousand
stars.