@DEWLine well the pleiades nebula is not that far, Elite Dangerous happens in the milky way 1286 years into the future.

It's based on astronomical data they had when building their 1:1 scale of the Galaxy in 2014. So they populated every star from every catalog first, then they used procedural generation for populating the rest based on estimated mass per sector and based on the shape the Galaxy has.

So it's denser in stars at the center and along the arms, and sparser outside those areas.

They had astrophysicists helping them out on this.

So on HIP 20485, they set it up like this :

Coordinates:
-0.125 / -58.625 / -141.8125
Distance to Sol:
153.45 ly
Main star type : K

Does that look correct to you ? As the name implies it comes from a catalog so surely they're not too far off :p