A Star Map of the Night We Met

You probably remember the room better than the sky. That’s fine. The sky was there anyway, doing what it does, entirely indifferent to the fact that something was starting underneath it.

We can tell you exactly what it was doing. And then print it.

You need less information than you think

A date. Roughly the time, evening is usually enough. The town.

That’s the whole list. From those three things we can compute which stars were above the horizon, where they sat relative to each other, whether the Moon was up and what shape it was in, and whether any planets were keeping an eye on proceedings.

If you’re a day or two out on the date, the sky barely notices. If you’re a month out, it does. Get as close as you can, and tell us if you’re guessing.

What the sky was probably doing

Here’s the honest version, because we’d rather you knew before you ordered.

Some nights make beautiful charts. A new Moon, a clear patch of the year, a bright planet sitting high. Some nights make thin ones. A full Moon washes out everything faint, and the chart comes back sparse.

Both are true records. We won’t improve the sky to sell you a nicer picture. If your night was a thin one, we’ll tell you what was up there and let you decide. Quite often the thin ones are the better prints anyway. There’s something to be said for a sky that wasn’t showing off.

The caption

Under the chart there’s a line of your words. Most people put the date and the place. Some put what was said.

We set it in the same serif as the rest of the print, small, so it reads as part of the map rather than a message stuck onto one.

How it’s made

Every chart is computed from astronomical data for your exact date and place, never assembled from stock artwork. The custom star map page explains the method in full, and describes the print itself, the sizes and the prices. If you’d like to see the same data working live, Tonight’s Sky is free.