View from Satellite. The USGS Store - One stop shop for all your maps, world, United States, state, wall decor, historic, planetary, topographic, trail, hiking, foreign, satellite, digital. 24 Nearby star/galaxy coordinates (Space) This article is from the Space FAQ, by Jon Leech leech@cs.unc.edu and Mark Bradford tla@surly.org with numerous contributions by others.
To generate 3D coordinates of astronomical objects, first obtain an astronomical database which specifies right ascension, declination, and parallax for the objects. Convert parallax into distance using the formula in part 6 of the FAQ, convert RA and declination to coordinates on a unit sphere (see some of the references on planetary positions and spherical trignometry earlier in this section for details on this), and scale this by the distance. Two databases useful for this purpose are the Yale Bright Star catalog (sources listed in FAQ section 3) or "The Catalogue of Stars within 25 parsecs of the Sun", in.