Starmap

The night sky, for any moment & place — free, in your browser.

  1. Date
    Change time 21:00
  2. 171,041 towns of 1,000+ people from GeoNames; picking one fills in the place and time zone.
    How the search works

    The list holds every town of 1,000 people or more — 171,041 places. The 29,919 of 18,000+ load when you start typing; a smaller town (Skagen, Bad Tölz) is fetched, about 110 KB at a time, only when that list has no answer. A small town is found by the start of any word in its name. Accents are optional (“malmo” finds Malmö) and å can be typed “aa” (“Aarhus” finds Århus). 86 well-known cities also answer to their other name (“Cologne” finds Köln, “Praha” finds Prague); every other town is searchable only by the spelling GeoNames stores. You can add the country after the name to narrow it, in English, German, Danish, Spanish or French — “Roskilde Denmark”, “Roskilde, Danmark” and “London, UK” all work. The state, province or region works too (“Guadalajara, Jalisco”, “Dresden, Sachsen”, “Austin, Texas”), by its GeoNames name (often English: “Bavaria”) or, for Spain, Germany, Austria, France and Mexico, its local name (“Bayern”, “Andalucía”, “NRW”); in the US, Canada and Australia also as a code (“Springfield MA”, “Vancouver, BC”). A typo still finds nothing rather than the wrong sky. Picking one fills the latitude, longitude and UTC offset.

    Coordinates & time zone

    Latitude runs −90 (South Pole) to 90 (North Pole); longitude −180 to 180, both ends inclusive. A number outside those ranges is not a point on Earth, so the map says so instead of drawing a chart of nowhere.

  3. More text subtitle, place, dedication

    Birth details

    For a birth poster: one centred line under the sky, such as “Emma · 3,450 g · 51 cm · 04:10”. It prints exactly what you type, in the unit you pick: nothing is converted or rounded, and an empty box prints nothing.

    Weight
    Length
Loading star catalog…

50 × 70 cm poster · for a print shop ·

50 × 70 cm poster · for a print shop ·

Your photo stays on this device: it is drawn into the file you download and sent nowhere.

More formats & sharing SVG, JPEG, PDF, print at home, laser, links

A link never carries a photo you added: it stays on this device, so whoever opens the link sees the poster without it.

— its settings and download are under More options.

More options layout, caption details, theme, size, projection, overlays, language, extras, laser
Layout
Caption
Style
Overlays
Rings the naked-eye star whose distance in light-years is closest to the time from the poster’s date to today, so the light reaching you now left it around that date, and prints its distance under the date. For someone turning 37 in 2026 that is Muphrid or Arcturus, 37.2 and 36.7 light-years away. Distances are Hipparcos parallaxes (van Leeuwen 2007); a star whose parallax is measured worse than 10% is not used, which leaves 1,417 of the 1,630 stars on the chart. Under four years no star is close enough (the nearest, α Centauri, is 4.1–4.3 light-years away), and for ages 5–8, 13–15, 18, 21, 23, 31–33, 62 and 68 none lies within half a light-year, so the poster names the closest star and the year its light really left.
Marks all 110 Messier objects and 23 southern and binocular showpieces (the Double Cluster, Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae, both Magellanic Clouds, the Carina Nebula, the Jewel Box…) with the symbols star atlases use, labelled M31, ω Cen and so on, with a key in the corner, and adds Uranus and Neptune. Most are binocular targets: only a handful, such as M31, M42, M45, Omega Centauri and the Magellanic Clouds, show to the naked eye from a dark site, and Neptune (magnitude 7.8) never does.
When your date falls inside one of the ten major annual showers on the International Meteor Organization’s list (Quadrantids, Lyrids, eta Aquariids, Southern delta Aquariids, Perseids, Draconids, Orionids, Leonids, Geminids, Ursids), a burst marks its radiant, the point its meteors seem to fly out from, whenever that point is above your horizon. The line under the chart adds how high it stands, where the Moon is and the best hours from your town. The rate it quotes is ZHR × sin(height): an upper bound for a perfectly dark sky, which town lights and moonlight cut, often by half or more. Ticked by default on the Observing chart.
Draws a great naked-eye comet that was above your horizon at that moment, from 21 apparitions since 1900: the Great Comet of 1901, the Great January Comet and Halley (1910), Skjellerup-Maristany (1927), the Great Southern Comet (1947), the Eclipse Comet (1948), Arend-Roland and Mrkos (1957), Seki-Lines (1962), Ikeya-Seki (1965), Bennett (1970), West (1976), Halley (1986), Hyakutake (1996), Hale-Bopp (1997), McNaught (2007), Lovejoy (2011), PANSTARRS (2013), NEOWISE (2020), Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (2024) and ATLAS (2025), on the nights it was brighter than magnitude 5. Positions come from JPL’s orbit for each comet and land within a fraction of a degree; the brightness is fitted to observers’ estimates and can be half a magnitude out, more during an outburst, and for the four comets before 1950 that rest on a few historical estimates, a magnitude or more. The head is sized by brightness and the tail points the way it really pointed, straight away from the Sun, but the tail’s length and shape are illustrative. Fainter comets and satellites are not drawn.
Laser & cutting machine
Text

Text is not converted to outlines.

The outer circle is a red hairline in its own cut layer; stars, lines and the horizon ring are black in an engrave layer. Stars whose dot would be smaller than the minimum are left out rather than burned as specks: at 200 mm with 0.3 mm dots and no text that keeps stars brighter than magnitude 3.5, the 300 brightest in the sky (about half of them above the horizon at any moment); at 300 mm it reaches magnitude 4.1, at 100 and 150 mm magnitude 3.3. Constellation lines still run between fainter stars. With text switched on, the title, place and date are kept as editable lines in a sans-serif font; turn them into paths in your cutting software (Inkscape: Path → Object to Path) before you send the job, or the machine may substitute a font.

All three downloads are free, complete and print-ready — no account, no email, no sign-up. The PNG is rasterized at 300 dpi for the size you picked (50 × 70 cm comes out at 5906 × 8268 px, A4 at 2480 × 3508 px); the SVG is vector, so it scales to any size at all. The PDF carries that same raster on a page recorded inside the file at the size you picked above — an A4 PDF is a 21 × 29.7 cm page, a 50 × 70 cm PDF a 50 × 70 cm one — so a printer reads the dimensions out of the file instead of being told them. Each file carries one small credit line along the bottom edge — nothing else is added or held back.

The Screen sizes in the menu are made for a display, not paper: the PNG comes out at the exact pixel count named in the menu (an iPhone wallpaper is 1179 × 2556 px), with the chart laid out for that screen — below the lock-screen clock and clear of the home-bar strip on a phone, inside the top and bottom 250 px a story app covers, beside the caption on a desktop. Those clear zones follow Apple’s, Android’s and Meta’s published guidance, not a measurement of every phone, so a lock screen with extra widgets can still overlap the top of the chart. They have no paper size, so there is no PDF for them.

Getting it printed

Handing it to a print shop? Upload the PDF: its page is exactly the size you picked in the menu, written into the file, so there is nothing to type into a notes box and nothing to rescale by mistake. If the shop wants a size that is not in the menu, hand it the SVG if they accept one — it is vector, so it carries no fixed size and stays sharp at whatever dimension they print it. If they only take raster files, send the PNG: it already comes out at the exact pixel count for the size you picked, at 300 dpi, so nothing needs enlarging. Check the file you were given against this list — if the pixel count is smaller, something along the way upscaled it:

  • 4 × 6 in1200 × 1800 px
  • 10 × 15 cm1181 × 1772 px
  • 5 × 7 in1500 × 2100 px
  • 13 × 18 cm1535 × 2126 px
  • A5 (14.8 × 21 cm)1748 × 2480 px
  • A4 (21 × 29.7 cm)2480 × 3508 px
  • US Letter (8.5 × 11 in)2550 × 3300 px
  • A3 (29.7 × 42 cm)3508 × 4961 px
  • 8 × 10 in2400 × 3000 px
  • 11 × 14 in3300 × 4200 px
  • 12 × 16 in3600 × 4800 px
  • 30 × 40 cm3543 × 4724 px
  • 16 × 20 in4800 × 6000 px
  • 40 × 50 cm4724 × 5906 px
  • A2 (42 × 59.4 cm)4961 × 7016 px
  • 18 × 24 in5400 × 7200 px
  • 50 × 70 cm5906 × 8268 px
  • A1 (59.4 × 84.1 cm)7016 × 9933 px
  • 60 × 90 cm7087 × 10630 px
  • 24 × 36 in7200 × 10800 px
  • 70 × 100 cm8268 × 11811 px

Which size each counter wants. A photo kiosk or a photo-print upload form prints 4 × 6 in, sold as 10 × 15 cm in metric countries: both are the same 2 : 3 shape, so either file fills either print with nothing cropped. Hand it the PNG, or the JPEG if yours takes JPEG only: Download JPEG writes the same picture at the same pixel size, with 300 dpi recorded in the file and the paper colour filled in (a JPEG holds no transparency). It is saved at quality 92, so the faintest stars and hairlines are a touch softer than in the PNG — not something a 10 × 15 print shows. A greeting card is most often 5 × 7 in (13 × 18 cm in metric shops; it is 3 mm wider than 5 × 7, so pick the one the order form names) or A5, half an A4 sheet; A5 keeps every mark 6.35 mm in from the edge like A4, so it also prints on a home printer. A frame shop or a ready-made frame wants the frame’s own size: 5 × 7 and 8 × 10 for a desk, 16 × 20 in or 40 × 50 cm for a wall, and 70 × 100 cm, a standard European poster size, for the largest one in this menu. For a frame with a mount, pick the frame’s size first and then a White border for a frame mount of 2, 4 or 6 cm: the file stays exactly the frame’s size, the border is plain white on all four sides and the whole poster is scaled down inside it, nothing cut off. It suits a mount whose opening is the page minus twice the border — 38 × 58 cm on 50 × 70 cm with 6 cm, 13 × 21.7 cm on A4 with 4 cm — and the poster keeps its own shape in that window, so it fills the width and leaves extra white above and below (13 × 18.4 cm on A4 with 4 cm). Measure the mount’s opening rather than trusting the frame’s label: many ready-made mounts are cut for a print much smaller than the frame, and an opening narrower than the poster covers its edges, so pick a wider border then. On the five small sizes the caption is set at a fixed printed size — no capital letter under 2 mm tall — and the sky disc shrinks to make room for it, so a 4 × 6 shows a smaller chart than the poster shape suggests. The star names inside the disc are not held to that minimum: on a 4 × 6 they print under 1 mm tall, so untick the labels there if you want a cleaner card. 70 × 100 cm is 97.7 million pixels; every browser builds it in strips, which takes longer than the other sizes.

Printing at home. Pick A4 or US Letter (A3 if your printer takes it), download the PDF and print it at Actual size or 100 % — not Fit to page, Scale to fit or Shrink oversized pages, which quietly shrink the whole chart by a few percent. On A4 and Letter every star, label and caption line is kept at least 6.35 mm (¼ in) inside each edge — the minimum side margin HP’s manual gives for US Letter on its Officejet 100, and more than the 3–4 mm many desktop printers need — so nothing is cut off at 100 %. Only the background colour runs to the edge, and a home printer leaves a thin white border there instead. A few inkjets need 12–13 mm at the bottom edge (HP lists 12.7 mm for the Officejet 4315); on those the small credit line along the bottom may be clipped. For the least ink, choose a light theme: noir leaves the paper white outside the disc and ink on paper lays only a pale cream tint, where the night theme covers the whole sheet in navy.

Frames. Of the larger sizes, four have a sourced off-the-shelf frame. IKEA’s picture-frame size guide names 30 × 40 cm and 50 × 70 cm among its most commonly chosen sizes; Frame Destination’s poster-size guide calls 18 × 24 in the most popular medium poster size and 24 × 36 in the most popular large one. 60 × 90 cm is the odd one out: the big ready-made frame is 61 × 91 cm, which is 24 × 36 in. So if you want a large map to drop straight into a shop-bought frame, pick 24 × 36 in — 60 × 90 cm will want a custom frame or a cut mount.

Ink. The night theme floods the whole sheet with dark navy — that is the one that drinks ink or toner. The ink-on-paper theme puts dark stars on cream and leaves most of the page bare: it is the cheap one to print and frame. Sepia and noir are light-background themes as well. Printing it yourself, that is a real saving; a shop that prices purely by paper size may well charge you the same whichever theme you hand it.

Questions, answered once

How accurate is the sky?

The 1,630 stars are the Yale Bright Star Catalogue: every star brighter than magnitude 5.0, which is every star a good eye sees from a dark site. Your date, time and town become a Julian Date and the local sidereal time, and each star is turned into its altitude and azimuth for that minute. Each catalogue place, written for the year 2000, is first carried to the sky of your date by long-term precession (the Vondrák, Capitaine & Wallace 2011 model in the IAU’s SOFA library); by 1066 that is 13° of the equinox’s slide, enough to move Vega and Deneb about 6°. Dates before 15 October 1582 are read in the Julian calendar, as they were written at the time. The Moon holds within 0.01° of NASA/JPL’s DE441 ephemeris, placed for where you stand on the Earth. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn hold within 0.16° of JPL Horizons on every date tested from 1900 to 2049, and the Sun within 0.01°. Two things are not modelled: the stars’ own proper motion (over 2,000 years Alpha Centauri drifts 2.1° and Arcturus 1.3°, every other star of magnitude 1.5 or brighter less than 0.4°) and atmospheric refraction, which lifts anything near the horizon by up to about 0.5°.

What does the chart draw, and what does it leave out?

The 89 constellation figures (Serpens comes in two halves), clipped at the horizon, with star dots sized by brightness and tinted by colour, and east on the left because a sky chart is read looking up. The Milky Way is drawn as a soft band whose centre line is the galactic equator, computed like the stars; its edges and star clouds are a hand-drawn sketch of the naked-eye band, not a photograph, and a checkbox turns it off. The Moon is drawn in its real phase and position, and only when it is above your horizon. The five naked-eye planets are drawn and labelled, sized by how bright each was that night. The Sun is drawn whenever it was up, and the line under the chart says whether your moment was daylight, civil, nautical or astronomical twilight, or full dark; the stars are always drawn where they stood, even when daylight hid them. A solar or lunar eclipse at your moment is drawn as well. Ticking Deep-sky objects adds Uranus, Neptune and 133 deep-sky objects: all 110 Messier objects and 23 southern and binocular showpieces such as Omega Centauri and both Magellanic Clouds. Tick Great comets and any of 21 great naked-eye comet apparitions since 1900 (Halley in 1910 and 1986, Hale-Bopp, NEOWISE, Lovejoy and sixteen more) is drawn where it stood, from JPL’s orbit for it; the tail is drawn in its true direction, straight away from the Sun, but its length and shape are illustrative. Satellites and faint comets are not drawn: this tool does not compute their orbits.

Which towns can I pick?

171,041 towns and villages of 1,000 people or more, from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0), so small places such as Skagen and Bad Tölz are there. Accents are optional (“malmo” finds Malmö); add the country to narrow a name down (“Roskilde Denmark” and “Roskilde, Denmark” both work), and the state, province or region works too, as its name (“Guadalajara, Jalisco”, “Dresden, Sachsen”, “Austin, Texas”) or, in the US, Canada and Australia, its code (“Springfield MA”, “Vancouver, BC”). Anywhere else, enter a latitude and longitude. The town sets the time zone, summer time included, so the time you type is the clock time there.

Is anything uploaded? Do I need an account?

No and no. The page is static and the astronomy runs in your browser: the dates, places and captions you type never leave it, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded. Copy shareable link writes the whole poster into the address itself, which is how a poster is kept; there is no copy on a server and nothing to log in to. The published site counts page views without cookies (GoatCounter) and never sees what you type.

Offline later: once you have opened the star map with a connection, it reopens and draws the chart with none, because your browser keeps a copy. Town-name search is the exception: its town list is not saved, so offline it says the list did not load; type a latitude and longitude instead. Not saved: the very first page you ever open on this site (open it again while online), and any page or link you have never opened.

Which size and which file should I print?

Pick the size before you download: every print preset is a real page. The PNG is that page at 300 dpi (50 × 70 cm is 5906 × 8268 px, A4 is 2480 × 3508), the JPEG is the same pixels for kiosks that refuse PNG, and the PDF is a page of exactly that size with the same picture in it, so a print shop’s upload form reads the size from the file. The SVG is vector and scales to any size. At home, print the PDF at “Actual size” (100 %), not “Fit to page”. For a big poster without a shop, Print at home cuts the PDF across A4 or US Letter sheets that overlap by 10 mm: 50 × 70 cm is 9 A4 sheets. On the five small sizes, 4×6 in to A5, the caption is held at a printed minimum and the disc shrinks to make room. Some phones refuse to build the largest PNGs; the SVG always works.

Is it really free?

Yes. Every option and every download is complete and free, with no account, no watermark and nothing to buy. The only mark is one credit line along the bottom edge, “Made with Starmap” and the address, which you are welcome to crop.

Wanted tonight’s sky, not a poster?

This page draws a sky that has already happened, laid out for printing. If what you actually came for is the sky where you are, three other free Polyatic tools answer that — same deal as this one: everything computed in your own browser, no account, nothing uploaded.