Real stars.
An honest picture.

We calculate a sky for a place and a specific time. That is different from a photograph of what someone actually saw: weather, daylight and light pollution are not shown.

The live designer

The live chart uses the HYG star catalogue, sidereal time and a stereographic projection. North is up and east is left, following this sky-chart convention. It draws stars above the geometric horizon, down to magnitude 6.5.

This fast preview uses J2000 catalogue coordinates without precession, proper motion or atmospheric refraction. It is a layout preview, not the final rendered proof. It does not display the Moon, planets or the Milky Way.

The rendered collection

The examples use a separate process with an ESO Milky Way panorama, Skyfield/JPL ephemerides and NASA planet images. The Moon and planets are enlarged for legibility. Planet textures are illustrative, not photographs from the selected date. The panorama has approximately 1–2 degrees of local alignment uncertainty.

If the Moon or a planet is below the horizon, it is left out. Unknown event times are never silently presented as known: the designer uses and labels 22:00 local time. Daylight-saving gaps and repeated hours require you to check the time.

Data and image credits

Full data and licence notices

• HYG v4.1, David Nash / Astronexus — CC BY-SA 4.0. Our browser dataset filters to magnitude 6.5, removes the Sun and rounds coordinates. The adapted dataset uses the same licence.
• Milky Way: ESO/S. Brunier — CC BY 4.0. The panorama is filtered, projected, desaturated and tone-mapped.
• NASA/JPL-Caltech: planet imagery, with the individual mission and agency credits. Final files must retain asset-specific credits. NASA does not endorse this product.
• d3-celestial, Olaf Frohn — BSD-3-Clause: constellation geometry.
• JPL DE421 / Skyfield: ephemerides. Montserrat / Cormorant Garamond: SIL Open Font License.

Full-resolution sale files and provider-specific crops will be released after artwork review and print checks pass.

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