Best source for star position data?

Hi,

Is there a de-facto standard source for star position data? As a
learning exercise I am trying to build a web hosted program to display
the stars near Earth in 3D rotatable display.

I have found the (YBSC) Yale Bright Star Catalog, but this only
contains stars above a certain magnitude and many of the stars lack
parallax data (so, I can not calculate distance).

I have also found Davis Nash's HYG (Hipparcos, Yale, Gliese) catalog,
but that lacks a lot of the supplemental data included in YBSC.

Is there a standard database of star positions used by modern
astronomers?

Thanks,
John

In article .com,
JohnH. wrote:
Is there a standard database of star positions used by modern
astronomers?

SIMBAD
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/Simbad

AIUI, this is a meta-database - a way of accessing many
databases through a common interface.
It's probably not much use for what you want though -
magnitudes, distances, colour information, parallaxes and proper
motions, in a uniform format for storage inside your website.
I remember seeing a database of stars near Earth go past my eyes
recently, possibly mentioned here. But I don't remember what the
address was.

--
Aidan Karley,
Aberdeen, Scotland,
Location: 57°10'11" N, 02°08'43" W (sub-tropical Aberdeen), 0.021233

In article .com,
"JohnH." writes:
Is there a standard database of star positions used by modern
astronomers?

There's nothing that contains all known data for all known stars, if
that's what you mean. Someone mentioned SIMBAD, and there's a
catalog service called VizieR
( http://vizier.hia.nrc.ca/viz-bin/VizieR ).
If you just want positions, the various Hipparcos catalogs are the
best around, but they don't go very faint. And despite that, there
are not a lot of other data for most of the Hipparcos stars.

--
Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
(Please email your reply if you want to be sure I see it; include a
valid Reply-To address to receive an acknowledgement. Commercial
email may be sent to your ISP.)