The Galactic Travel Guide
Since I was quite young, reading any sort of future sci-fi where humanity has expanded out into the universe will inevitably use real life stars to house planetary systems, either colonized by Earthicans (to borrow a turn of phrase from Futurama ), inhabited by aliens, or the subject of exploration (usually with unusual lifeforms or ancient ruins). Often they would just be offhand comments using well-known star names (Rigel, Deneb, Sirius) or using the common Bayer nomenclature (Greek letter + constellation name) without any real thought to where the star war relative the Earth or with any other stars also mentioned. Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor, who inevitably be one of the first visited. However, you would occasionally have situations where there was a more concerted effort to use real-world data. The Traveller: 2300 TTRPG, published in 1986, extensively used the Gliese Catalog of Near Stars to populate their setting. However, on...
