Well in practice there are Python libraries to do it for you ;-) For example Simbad: https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/simbad/simbad.html https://as

Well in practice there are Python libraries to do it for you ;-) For example Simbad: https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/simbad/simbad.html https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/simbad/simbad.ht... Stars and various other objects get string ids like "HIP19550" https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?protocol=html&Ident=HIP+19550 https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?protocol=html&Iden... Then there are a bunch of different coordinate systems, you usually want to be doing lookups like "I have this particular telescope at this particular location and orientation, how should I configure it to point at this celestial object" and there is typically some astropy library function that will figure that stuff out for you. In practice the stuff outside our solar system doesn't change its apparent motion much from our point of view. The further away an object, the less its apparent location changes. So these databases get updated every once in a while.