Custom star map
The sky from your night, made to keep
Tell us where and when. We place every star exactly where it stood above you that night, and set it with your words, for your own wall or as the gift they’ll keep.
From USD $29·Delivery included on prints
Free to design. You only pay when you’re happy with it.
5,044 stars
each placed for your date, time and place
Three ways to have it
Choose how you’ll give it
The same real sky in every format. Pick one now and change your mind in the designer.
- Ready to give
Framed print
FromUSD $119
Ready to hang the day it arrives. The one to give.
- A black, white or natural wood frame
- Heavyweight archival matte paper
- Delivery included
Fine art print
FromUSD $45
The same archival print, unframed, to frame your own way.
- 12×18, 18×24 or 24×36 inches
- Heavyweight archival matte paper
- Delivery included
Digital file
USD $29
In their inbox minutes after checkout, for the gift you need tonight.
- High-resolution file, sized for printing
- Sent by email straight after checkout
- Print or frame it however you like
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.
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.