Print a star map poster

The Star-map poster tab draws the real sky of the place and moment in the side panel as a poster. Open File → Templates… → Star map gift for an example: Paris on 14 June 2019 at 23:30.

Set the moment

The poster always shows the sky of the side panel, so set Place name, Coordinates, Time zone, Local date and Local time first. For a wedding or birthday, use the time of the event; for a whole evening, 22:00 to 23:00 is a good choice. If you pick a time in daylight the poster still shows the stars that were above you, which is what most people want on a gift.

Design the poster

• Style offers five looks: Midnight blue, Ivory print, Black and gold, Blueprint and Night-vision red.
• Paper size includes A4, A3 and A2 portrait, US Letter, 12 × 16 in, 18 × 24 in and a 300 × 300 mm square. The layout scales to the paper.
• Title, Subtitle and Place line are printed under the chart. Leave Date line (blank = local date and time) empty to print the local date and time, or write your own words.
• Faintest stars (magnitude) decides how many stars appear: 6 shows about 2 000 stars above the horizon, like a dark country sky.
• The switches add Constellation lines, Constellation names, Star names, Moon and planets, an Altitude grid, Star colours (from each star's measured colour index), Compass letters and a Coordinates line.

The preview on the left updates with every change. Use Edit → Undo if you prefer an earlier version.

Export for printing

• Download PDF writes a one-page vector PDF at the exact paper size — the best choice for print shops.
• Download SVG writes the same vector drawing for design programs.
• Download PNG (300 dpi) renders a high-resolution image, for example 3508 × 4961 pixels for A3.

The PDF uses the standard PDF fonts. If your texts use characters outside Western European scripts (for example Japanese or Arabic), Skyfold tells you that they are replaced in the PDF; the SVG and PNG keep them exactly.

Good to know

Skyfold draws the geometric sky: no clouds, no light pollution and no Milky Way band. Star positions come from the HYG database (version 4.1, CC BY-SA 4.0) and are precessed to your date; constellation figures come from d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn.

To share the design, use File → Share link…: the link carries the place, the moment and the poster settings, with coordinates rounded to about a kilometre.

Next: the cosmic odometer and camera framing.