A birthday sky
The sky over the city where you were born, at the hour you arrived or just after dark. Most people keep the default 21:00: dark enough to read the whole chart, and still close to that evening.
Star Map Poster Generator
Recreate the real night sky over any place on any night since 1900 - a birthday, the night you met, a wedding day - then turn it into a poster or a phone wallpaper.
Real star positions, precessed to the date 100% private - in-browser Free, no sign-up
--
Your date and place never leave your device. Every calculation and every pixel happens in your browser.
What people put in a star map
A star map records a moment, not a personality. These are the dates people ask for most, and all of them need the same three things: a date, a rough hour and a place.
The night you met
A first date, a first kiss, the night that ran until sunrise. With the city and a rough hour, that sky can be rebuilt to the degree - the poster describes a moment, not a mood.
Weddings and anniversaries
A wedding is the easiest star map of all: the date, the venue and even the hour are printed on the invitation. The same chart printed year after year becomes an anniversary series.
Engagements and proposals
Use the day you plan to ask, or the night you met - the poster is a prop and a keepsake at once. Print the version without a frame for the proposal, add the gallery mat afterwards.
In memory of someone
A last birthday, a date that mattered, the sky over a hometown. Many people leave the title empty and write only the caption.
Two skies hung together
Two birth dates, two cities, two posters side by side. Couples who met online often frame the two hometown skies rather than hunting for one shared night.
Questions people ask
Turning a date into a gift
Why the sky on your birthday is not your star sign
On your birthday the Sun sits in front of your zodiac constellation, so that constellation crosses the sky in daylight and is invisible at night. The poster shows the opposite half of the sky - the part that stands overhead at midnight in the season you were born. Someone born in early August, under Leo, gets Aquarius, Capricornus and the Square of Pegasus overhead at midnight, not Leo.
That is not a flaw in the calculation, it is geometry, and it is worth knowing before you hand the poster over and get asked about it. The chart answers "what was actually above me", not "what sign am I".
The hard part is not the date, it is the hour
The whole sky turns 15 degrees per hour, so a two-hour error shifts the chart by 30 degrees - noticeable, but the constellations still read correctly. A wrong date is what breaks a chart: one month off and it is a different season entirely.
If you do not know the time, tick "I don't know the exact time". We draw 21:00 local time, which is fully dark at most latitudes and seasons. Your clock time is converted with that year's historical time-zone rules, so a summer date in 1974 in Paris uses the daylight-saving offset that actually applied then.
Printing it so it looks like a print, not a screenshot
The poster exports at 1800x2400 px: 30x40 cm at 150 dpi, or 15x20 cm at 300 dpi. Both are common frame sizes in Europe and North America - check local sizes before ordering.
Keep the mat: that off-white border is what makes a very dark chart read as a print. Choose matte paper over glossy, and skip coloured mounts - the subject is already dark enough.
What the chart shows, and what it leaves out
Stars brighter than magnitude 5 come from the HYG catalogue, precessed from J2000 to your date; the Moon and planets come from truncated VSOP87 and ELP2000 series. Orientation follows local apparent sidereal time and a stereographic projection centred on the zenith, which keeps constellation shapes undistorted.
What is not simulated is the observer: haze, light pollution and atmospheric extinction decide which of those stars you could really have seen. And the caption you write is not astronomy - it is yours.