Card only · NASA star data
The Sky card
The sky above the birthplace at the birth minute, as a naked eye would have seen it. It is not part of the free reading: it is made to order, as a card.
- Stars
- The Yale Bright Star Catalogue (5th edition), via NASA HEASARC: about 9,100 stars. The card draws every one above your horizon down to magnitude 6.0, a naked-eye sky, each sized by its brightness.
- Star names
- The brightest stars carry their official IAU names, as many as fit without labels touching.
- Constellations
- The constellation figures of the modern western sky culture, from the open d3-celestial dataset, drawn as fine lines and named where enough of each is up.
- The Moon and the planets
- The Moon at its real phase, and every planet above the horizon at that minute, labelled.
- The year and the day
- For a pet or a moment in time, a meeting, a wedding or a launch, the card also names the year’s animal, turning at Lìchūn as the Chinese solar calendar does, and the Thai colour of the day, the Thai day beginning at sunrise. Both describe the date; neither is a reading or a prediction.
- How to read it
- The centre is the point overhead; the circle is the horizon, marked N, E, S, W. The faint rings are 30° and 60° above the horizon.
- Accuracy
- Our positions are checked against NASA JPL Horizons on every test run, not on your order. The card needs the date, the time, the timezone and the place: without them there is no sky to draw.
Stars: Yale Bright Star Catalogue (NASA HEASARC) · Sun, Moon and planets: JPL DE421, tested against JPL Horizons · Names and figures: d3-celestial.
Computing the sky