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About - The Night Sky Atlas

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The night sky atlas is an interactive map of the entire night sky. It allows viewing any part of the sky and creating sky chart images and printouts.

The default atlas view is today's point in the sky approximately opposite to the sun. It is visible tonight, during most of the night from anywhere on Earth except near the poles. The declination defaults to +15 degrees, just enter your geographic latitude for the declination to see what's directly overhead at midnight tonight. Then add or subtract 1 hour to the default right ascension for each hour after or before midnight, respectively.

The form fields for viewing a portion of the sky and their ranges are:

right ascension: 0.0 to 24.0 hours  (J2000 equinox & epoch)
declination: -90.0 to +90.0 degrees  (J2000 equinox & epoch)
viewing angle: 0.0 to 180.0 degrees  (image diagonal field of view)
view twist: -360.0 to +360.0 degrees (rotation about image center)
image width: 75 to 1500 pixels
image height: 75 to 1500 pixels
(All values are in decimal format.)

Images are produced in PNG format for lossless image compression and fast transmission. PDF files are available in color for viewing and printing on color printers, and also in monochrome for high-quality printouts on black & white only laser printers. Some color changes are made to account for the white paper background. Layouts are sized to fill a standard 8.5x11 sheet. The Milky Way is always excluded from monochrome PDFs.

The author of The Night Sky Atlas is Gill Couto and can be reached at mailbox.gill@gmail.com for any info. All data source credits go to their respective authors. Enjoy!

The night sky atlas creates images of the entire night sky independent of location and time on earth. Detailed chart images include all stars visible to the naked eye, the constellations, Messier objects, and names of the brightest stars. Data sources: Bright Star Catalog from the Astronomical Data Center, Messier Objects from the Digitized Sky Survey Messier Objects Data, Star names list from Steven Gibson. The data used in this product, in whole or in part, is used with permission of The NGC/IC Project LLC. Many thanks go to those who maintain and make available their astronomy datasets without which this sky atlas would not have been possible. Permission for any use of these chart images is granted, provided that the original website address remains visible on all images. Enjoy!

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