I'm sure it could have been done - the catalogues already existed and they did publish right ascension, declination, proper motion, RV spectrometer and parallax data. The problem was those catalogues were not in machine readable form and you do have to do (not much but some) math for each star to get its {x,y,z} and {x',y',z'} coordinates. So while it could have been done, the task would have been painful, error prone and enormous. Just having the data in machine readable form would have made the task doable, but I suspect it probably wasn't. (possibly a good reason to have taken a local university astronomy class).

-------- Original Message --------

On February 11, 2018 10:54 PM, Rupert Boleyn xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

I remember trying to put together a 'real world' star map centred on

Earth for a game some time in the early 80s. I had my local library as

my only data source and in the end gave up. There were plenty of books

showing skymaps, with the stars, constellations, etc., but none that

gave much in the way of distances other than a few lists of "10

brightest stars" and "10 closest stars" that had distance.

The university library might've had something useful, but I expect if it

did I'd have had to compile all the data I needed from several books,

all by hand, after finding the volume that were actually useful.

These days I can find all that, already done, on the net with only a

little effort.