There are several excellent resources for looking up stuff in space, and it isn't limited to just the milky way. Celestia has been mentioned and is an excellent program for aesthetic views that are more or less astrometrically correct (which is about as correct as we can get from our point of view). There are other programs, such as Starry Night (in its various incarnations), The Sky, Megastar, Cartes du Ciel, etc. <BR><BR>Most are more mapping or atlas programs and don't necessarily have the 3 dimensional perspectives (Starry Night does as does Celestia). Even 3D approaches are somewhat limited since we really have very limited distance information available to stars, galaxies, et al, compared to the discrete measured distances we have across our planet's surface or in our local solar system.<BR><BR>Pokrface gave a very succinct and excellent summary of how we classify stars.<BR><BR>Names of stars is a very, very ambiguous and broad topic. A good answer is, "It depends", which really isn't much of an answer. A better answer is a bit longer.<BR><BR>Stars have been named over and over again for, probably about as long as humans have had it in their mind to name them. We have some names of stars that have evolved over time from such sources in antiquity as the Sumerians, Chaldeans, Persians, and much later, the Arabs. Those describe only the brightest stars that we can see with our unaided eyes. This is where we get the proper names for many bright stars such as Rigel.<BR><BR>Later, through and towards the end of the middle ages, other star naming conventions emerged. One popular one in western culture (the Chinese had their own conventions that were very good, by the way) was to associate the stars with their constellation (which were more or less generally accepted for the northern hemisphere constellations, at least). Bayer named them in descending brightness order (sort of, his subjective view was not always correct) with Greek letter names. So Regulus (the brightest star in Leo) was named Alpha Leonis, Denebola (the second brightest) is Beta Leonis, and so on. Again, this only resolves the naming of stars that we can see with our unaided eyes.<BR><BR>As star surveys through telescopes became common (partly driven by commerce for navigation purposes), other names more resembling catalogues emerged. There are now several different stellar databases out there. Some are more general purpose in nature (such as the USNO databases), while some are more specific (such as the Hubble Guide Star Catalog or the Washington Double Star Catalog). The more specific ones focus on special types of stars or star groups, or in the case of the Hubble Guide Star Catalog (GSC), the catalog is for a specific purpose, and so it has only a limited amount of stellar information available other than relative sky position.<BR><BR>On a side note, since there are many multiple star systems out there (binary, etc), the general convention is to assign English alphabetic characters according to descending brightness that are attached to the primary star name. Thus, Sirius, aka Alpha Canis Majoris, which has a small white dwarf companion, is more properly named Sirius A and its companion, Sirius B, using the Bayer system.<BR><BR>I hope this helps. You have received some excellent answers collectively from what I have seen.<BR><BR>Bic