Dear Joe,
I am sorry to hear that you are having trouble downloading the data. I have just run the code again (on MMA 11.1.1) and do not have any indication that anything is going wrong. I do not get an error when I run the code. (There was however, one typo, I just noticed. It was \Transpose in one line instead of //Transpose; fixed now.)
And you are right that downloading can take some time, but it is far below 6 hours for me. I think that it depends a bit on where you are and which server is used to provide the data to you. You are in Oregon (?), and I am not sure which server Wolfram use for you. I am in Scotland and I have to wait a little bit, but after 13 minutes I am done downloading. Here is a screenshot of the results:
I am not sure how to help with the server issue. Have you tried using a proxy-server to another location? The amount of data transferred is rather low.
starData // ByteCount
is just under 10 MB. So, if you get a better server, that might help. Another thing is that there might be a bit of load balancing going on. I am about to post another thing where I use a lot of data from Wolfram servers - not 10000 but rather 100000s of data points. I have noticed that downloading them in smaller batches helps (and probably eats up more points for API requests).
Best wishes,
Marco
