I found some other archives where you can search stellar datasets (other than Vizier).
Here is one from the Gaia project.
And here is one from NASA.
So I'll get this eventually, but for now I'm still struggling. For instance, searches are often truncated to 1000 or 2000. But I'm only expecting several hundred star systems, so that should work, yet I keep hitting the max on my searches. The Hipparcos search doesn't let you limit the search by parallax, just RA and DEC, so that's a bother since otherwise it has everything I want. Some datasets do let you limit a search by parallax, but I am clearly not understanding how that works or something because when I try to limit my search to 10 parsecs in the Gaia dataset I get 1722 objects,
of which 63 appear to be closer than Proxima Centauri. (And, yes, I am converting milliarcsec to arcsec.)
And I keep seeing parallaxes that are listed as a negative number! How in the hell do you get a
negative parallax?!?
Grrr. As I said, I'm not understanding
something.