Thanks for the response - It would be very helpful to have clearer names for the closest stars whenever they are being discussed. I think it is interesting that most people have a mental map of the Earth and of the solar system, but almost no one has a mental map of the closest stars in our stellar neighborhood. When you do map them, as I did on
www.closeststars.com, it just feels wrong to use cryptic catalog names like Lalande 21185 or Luyten 726-8. Giving them constellation-based proxima names makes it much easier to visualize their location. It's not so important knowing that a star is the closest in a particular constellation, but just knowing that it is one of the closest to us, and then where it happens to be. This will become more of an issue in the future, when we eventually send probes to stars, and these stars will of course be the first we can visit.