I've downloaded Pandas and I'm fine with Skyfield planets. I want to find the hipparcos location numbers of stars. Rhodes Mill tutorial only has one example listing the Barnard Star. How does python/ skyfield access these star locations? e.g How do I get the location of Sirius?
from skyfield.api import Star, load
from skyfield.data import hipparcos
with load.open(hipparcos.URL) as f:
df = hipparcos.load_dataframe(f)
barnards_star = Star.from_dataframe(df.loc[87937])
(This might be a more appropriate question for https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/ since it’s not specifically a question about programming, but I’ll go ahead and answer it here since I’m never quite sure of which way the votes will go on a particular question.)
There are several online search services for the Hipparcos catalog. A Google search shows this to be a popular source, for example:
https://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR?-source=1239/hip_main
Entering "Sirius" into the text field, it returns a record with HIP number 32349, which I believe is the number you can use with Skyfield.
HIP numbers are important enough that they also tend to be mentioned in other reference works. For example, the Wikipedia page for Sirius also lists it as “HIP 32349” — it’s a little hard to find, so I use Ctrl+F in my browser to search for “HIP”, but it’s down near the very bottom of the big reference sidebar: