About Moments As Art

The sky from your night, made to keep

We make prints of the real night sky. Tell us where and when, and we place every star exactly where it stood above you that night, then set it with your words, for your own wall or as the gift they’ll keep.

Free to design. You only pay when you’re happy with it.

A bride in tears, holding a framed star map of the night sky

5,044 stars

each placed for your date, time and place

Last night’s sky over Vancouver, October 4 at 10:30 PM, with what was straight overhead facing you. Drag or flick it to spin the whole sky.

Where the stars come from

The real sky, not an illustration of one

5,044 real stars
Every star bright enough to see with the naked eye, placed from the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos catalogue, with all 88 official constellations drawn between them.
The right moment, to the minute
We look up the time zone and daylight-saving rules in force at your place on your date. They have changed over the years, and getting them wrong turns the whole sky by an hour.
Corrected for the years since
The stars shift slowly over the decades as the Earth’s axis wobbles. Each chart is corrected for that drift, so a sky from 1985 is the sky from 1985.
Checked against the real sky
Our calculations are tested against published star positions, and each star is tinted by its measured colour, from blue-white Rigel to orange Arcturus.

Star positions from the ESA Hipparcos catalogue, via d3-celestial. Positions for your time and place calculated with astronomy-engine. Historical time zones from the IANA time zone database.

A moon phase print: a waxing gibbous moon over Vancouver, captioned with the date and phase

Moon phase print

Or the moon from that night

The same moment, a different view. We work out the moon’s phase for your date, time and place, and the way it tilted from where you stood, then draw it from NASA’s maps of the lunar surface: every crater along the shadow’s edge where it really fell.

Same prices as the star map, from USD $29

Lunar surface from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, via the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio CGI Moon Kit.