Questions
- 1. Would the positions change as the player jumps from system to system?
2a. Would these systems be used to actually place them in the star map, so we could go to them?
2b. If we actually have the correct positions of the stars on the skybox, should one be able to "click them" to set destination, or get the name? This might be too much of a luxury, but I don't know how much hassle implementing this would be.
3. It's not clear to me how one would make the transition from "actual real stars" to procedurally generated ones, since there is not sharp threshold in the catalogues on distance from (0,0,0), I assume, since it is after magnitude rather than position/distance.
4. Which catalogues would one use? Some candidates are listed below
According to wikipedia the Tycho-2 catalogue has 2.24 million stars, and is 99% complete down to magnitudes of 11. (there's a perl program to read it, as well as some ty2read.c program, see wikipedia).
Data available here: http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?I/259
GSC-2
The Guid Star Catalogue II (v. 2.3) has some 945.59 million stars, down to magnitude 21. wikipedia says "This is the first full sky star catalogue created specifically for navigation in outer space" which sounds neat? Apparently used by the Hubble telescope.
Data (200 GB) not available for online download here: http://gsss.stsci.edu/Catalogs/GSC/GSC2/GSC2.htm
(I should be able to get my hands on that data, I suspect, if it is of interest)
EDIT
There is an old pull request with a script for parsing data, that was never merged, which does serve as a good starting point: #1426,