Number the stars

and figure which way they're going.

Some years ago we were working with Sloan Digital Sky Survey on a software management design. I thought the project was quite cool, and if I hadn't been working on CDF I might have been interested in joining. "The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has created the most detailed three-dimensional maps of the Universe ever made, with deep multi-color images of one third of the sky, and spectra for more than three million astronomical objects." (read "galaxies and quasars", not stars) (When our sons were little, I tried to put glow in the dark stars on their ceiling to display the Southern Sky, but it never looked quite right and I gave up 1/4 of the way through.)

It looks like it might get a little complementary competition from WEAVE, a multi-object survey spectrograph that is supposed to take spectographs of as many as 1000 different stars in our galaxy in a single exposure. Of course that only gives the star's relative speed towards or away from us, and doesn't tell us anything about side-to-side motion, but that's important already (SDSS does that too). The transverse (side to side) motion we can measure with enough patience--a few hundred thousand years should be good enough to measure most of them. Stars in our galaxy are close enough that you don't worry about the expansion contribution to red shift (they can estimate gravitational contributions).

WEAVE is going after stars to try to get a handle on how things are moving in our Milky Way

Unfortunately the SDSS only gets part of the sky, thanks to the Milky Way getting in the way. They've over 4 million galaxies. WEAVE will have some blind spots thanks to dust clouds, and uncertain regions ditto, but they should be able to improve the current catalog a lot.

I wonder how a VR view of the local stars would look. You'd only see all the familiar constellations from one vantage point, of course--what would you see in the sky if you moved your POV elsewhere?

Would you put a bubblegram of the local stars on your desk? I wish I'd finished the ceiling, even though it didn't look right and faded decades ago...