Nearest Stars

A List of the Nearest Stars
This is a list of stars that lie within 20 light years as known in the year 2006. Where possible data for this list is from the Hipparcos Catalogue and the 3rd Gliese Catalogue of Nearby Stars with some extra information from elsewhere. Except for the closest and the brightest stars there is no real agreement on what to call these stars, but I have tried to pick fairly common names. I have provided a lot of other catalogue numbers for all these stars. Many professional astronomers prefer to use Gliese Catalogue numbers for the nearest stars.

Stars within 20 lys (6.13 parsecs) (109 stars and 8 brown dwarfs)

Key To Table

 * Column 1: A common name for the star.
 * Column 2: Letter denoting a member of a multiple system.
 * Column 3: The Right Ascension in hours and minutes for epoch 2000.
 * Column 4: The Declination in degrees and minutes for epoch 2000.
 * Column 5: Galactic longitude.
 * Column 6: Galactic latitude.
 * Column 7: The spectral classification of the star.
 * Column 8: Apparent magnitude.
 * Column 9: Absolute magnitude.
 * Column 10: Parallax in milli-arcseconds, from the Hipparcos catalogue for stars above mag 12, otherwise from the 3rd Gliese catalogue.
 * Column 11: The approximate error in the parallax in milli-arcseconds.
 * Column 12: The distance in light years (=3.2616/parallax).
 * Column 13: Separation between components in the system. For example, 'AB:23 AU' means that the distance between star A and B is 23 astronomical units.