What I did was to get some star catalogues and then sort them by galactic longitude; that way you can have a rough idea of which stars will be in which directions, although the distance estimates can be very far off so it's an inexact art.
*Most* stars in the HIP catalogue are in ED, although not necessarily under their HIP designation. Almost every star from the HR catalogue is in, as you'd expect. Maybe, I dunno, a third or half of HD. There are many strange and wonderful catalogue designations in the game, but they're not usually 'complete.'
Even in RL, we don't usually have the information needed to say "in this particular area, you will find star such-and-such" because our estimates of distance are not precise, except for stars which are close to us. We know the direction of stars exactly, but the distance we don't know so well. Even the distance to obvious stuff like the Pleiades has been the source of some controversy.
do you have
- such estimated coirdinates for the pistol star?
- a formula to share to calculate estimated coordinates from ra/dec and estimated distance?
looking for both since ages