On 13 May 2018 at 01:31, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote: The Gaia data release 2 data is out. Gaia being an ESA spacecraft that is measuring the the position of about a billion stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft) The most straightforward application is you can chuck pretty much any star in the milky way that we have an article on into the search function at: http://gea.esac.esa.int/archive/ And get an accurate distance to it. For example wikipedia says WR 25 is about 7500 lightyears away. Once you've converted through from milli arcseconds (mas) Gaia says 68500 (divide by a 1000 then divide 1 by that number to get the parsecs distance then multiply by 3.26 to get lightyears). Beyond stars the improved Cepheid variable measurements will allow us to update the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies article with better data and hopefully get a new study on what is an isn't in the local group (most of the sources I'm finding for that are from around 2000 and things have moved on). -- geni