Overhead (galactic North) view of the stars in and around the Vela Constellation with distance I am working on a project and would like to have a star map--seen from "above" (Galactic North?) that calls out the stars in the Vela constellation and shows their distance from sol / earth.

I realize that any 2D map will not show the Z-axis, but I'm okay with that (especially if there's a notation).

I want to be able to show which stars in the Vela constellation are closer to earth vs. further away.

Is there anything like this? I've looked and can't find it.
note: I'm about to practice Astronomy without a license, if I've said something wrong please feel free to comment or just edit and correct it, thanks!



Wikipedia's Vela (constellation) lists its brightest stars and links to each star's Wikipedia page. Here are the first five of them:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_Velorum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Velorum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa_Velorum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_Velorum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH_Velorum


On each page at the bottom of the data box on the right side there is a link to the star's page in Symbad. For Gamma Velorum (HD 68243) for example, the page is http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=HD+68243

On that page you can see the galactic coordinates (GAL coor) are about 262.806, -07.697 and since you only want a 2D map use the azimuth (262.806) to draw a line from our position in the solar system, which is the origin of galactic coordinates (for more on that see answers to How was the galactic plane established? and also can you translate a GPS coordinate to a Galactic coordinate.

Now how far away is the star from us on that line? Use the parallax value for that. For the Gamma Velorum example it is about 3.556 milliarcseconds. the distance to an object (measured in parsecs) is the reciprocal of the parallax (measured in arcseconds). So the distance here is 1/0.003556 or 281.2 parsecs which is about 917.2 light years. 

For your 2D projection on to a flat map, you'll need to foreshorten that distance, so multiply by cos(altitude): $\cos(-07.697)=0.9910$ so you put your dot along the azimuth line at 917.2 times 0.9910 = 908.2 light years.

You'll have to decide what to do if one of the stars is far away from the plane of the galaxy, because the projected distance won't accurately reflect the actual distance.