If you picked stars at random from our galaxy, what would they tend to look like? How the stars are selected can give you very different answers of what a typical star is like. The figure below shows where the 100 apparently brightest stars in our sky would be plotted and where the 100 nearest stars would be plotted on the H-R diagram. Both data sets are from the Hipparcos survey. The stars that appear bright in our sky also are intrinsically luminous for the most part. They are the diamonds in the diagram. The near stars are all within 7.63 parsecs of the Sun. They are plotted with the upside-down triangles. A great majority of the near stars are cool and faint.