Left: HIPPARCOS parallax histogram for all 113 942 stars from van Leeuwen (2007) with ϖ >  0 mas (1728 objects fall outside the plotted range). Right: distribution of the first significant digit of the HIPPARCOS parallaxes together with the theoretical prediction of Benford’s law. The data have vertical error bars to reflect Poisson statistics, but the error bars are much smaller than the symbol sizes.