
StarCharter – CLI tool for producing vector-graphics charts of the night sky - app4soft
https://github.com/dcf21/star-charter
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ringshall
This looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing.

From time to time I've looked around for good charts of the night sky,
suitable for printing and browsing. These are the best I've found so far; they
might be helpful to users of this program as a guide for how to design charts:

[https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/](https://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/)

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7532yahoogmail
Dude: not only great idea, well executed: practical, direct, to the point

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DagAgren
What, exactly, are "constellation boundaries" good for? They seem to just be
weird visual noise that doesn't really help with anything.

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dylan604
The night sky is big. These boundaries just help define an area of the sky
that is easily communicated between other people. They help define physical
locations. It's like discussing New York City, but then breaking that down
into the boroughs Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and Bronx. It
just makes discussing a large area much more manageable. With constellation
boundaries, you not only describe a physcial location in the sky, but
potentially also a time of year (even night) as certain parts of the sky are
only visible at certain times.

For a much more wordy read:
[http://www.ianridpath.com/boundaries.htm](http://www.ianridpath.com/boundaries.htm)

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DagAgren
I'm not sure I still see the value. The boundaries shown on modern maps are
very strange and complicated shapes, and seem extremely arbitrary. Does it
really help me in any way to know inside which convoluted an non-intuitive
shape a star is?

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dylan604
I'm sorry the concept of boundaries being used to define specific areas are
beyond you. Not sure how else I can help. If you look at the boundaries of any
modern map of the geography of the earth, nothing is in straight lines. The
borders of countries are very complicated shapes, yet you pretty much know if
you are in a country or not. Cities are the same way, yet you probably know
when you leave your city. Breaking into smaller neighborhoods it gets even
more confusing, but yet again, you probably know when you're in your
neighborhood or you're in the one next door. Knowing those boundaries comes
from experience traveling around the areas. It'll happen the same way if you
actually study astronomy versus just being obtuse about a subject on the
internet.

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op03
How does my location factor into it? I usually have to set time and location
on apps and sites and dont see any mention of lat/long here...

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racingmars
This isn't really creating a "what's in the sky right now" chart (which
requires your location & time) so much as a map of the sky based on standard
astronomical coordinates. These are the sorts of charts you'd see printed in
sky atlases, for example, which don't have any relationship to your location
or current time.

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op03
Ah I see. Thanks!

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ngcc_hk
Might be useful with ITelescope as the parameter per telescope and time and
location could be parameter.

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erwinh
Really cool, gonna give it a try tomorrow!

