blank astronomy star chart ?

JimP

I want to work on the constellations for Crestar. I do have some 3 constellation pngs drawn... but they could be improved.

Looking for a blank astronomy png, bmp I can import into CC3 and use that to draw constellations.

No right declinition and ascension numbers as I want to make my own.

I did do a google.com and a dogpile.com web search. The only 'blank' star charts I could find were ones without labels. But plenty of stars. Not the item I'm looking for.

Thanks !

Terraformer_Author

Jim - working on it now - stand by...I am attempting to make you some, lol.

JimP

Muchas gracias !

Terraformer_Author

Ok Jim - I made a Northern and Southern sky view template deal - and I'm also passing some other simple grid patterns along also in .png - all packed in the zip, look it over and tell me if you can do anything with them. Simple, common geometric polygonal shapes and patterns in and of themselves can't be copyrighted in the U.S. Unless they are incorporated into a stylized product or image - Your good to go.

Terraformer_Author

Here's what I did with it just fiddling around in a graphics app, You might want to erase the first inner band and get rid of the white center of the grid (black on the obverse colored) so that you could maybe stick a constellation in going across the celestial pole, or a polar star perhaps.:

JimP

I'll see what I can do a week or two with that.

Terraformer_Author

Well Jim - in the meantime I'll keep looking here and there for better stuff when I get the chance because I have some ideas for projects where those types of grids might be handy. If CC3 has a native polar perspective template - then that also might be useful. You want a polar cooridinate grid or graph image to work with.

The problem that I've found looking for these across the net is that the lines in the grids are always seemingly too fat / too bold. That - and I don't really know what too look for because I've already searched with terms like "Polar Grid", Polar Graph", "Global Polar Grid", "Free Polar Graphs / Grids", etc.. It would be nice to find some blank global polar grid set images - might search under "Latitude And Longitude" later. If I can blow these grids up to a larger size / resolution then more could be done with them I suppose.

JimP

Large scale chart. Like the ones that start at zero right ascension and go to 90 degrees and cover say 90 degrees of declination. I think i got that correct.

Its basically a mercator view of one quadrant of the night sky. Starting at the horizon and going up to directly overhead.

I haven't been able to find an example. I did buy some years ago as a set of sky charts. About 25 degrees wide and 6 degrees high each chart. I think there were 30 of them to cover all of the night sky, both hemispheres.

Ah, they were called: Sky Publishing Tirion Atlas 2000.0 by Wil Tirion.

Ah, scroll down on this page to see a small part of one:
Wil Tirion

JimP

This is for iPhone, but it shows the map as a larger entity;

iPhone version

jslayton

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?2164-Making-Starfields-with-Fractal-Terrains may or may not be helpful to you. The important part is that the sky sphere can be projected just like a planetary sphere. Plop your basic start chart onto the world as an image and reproject to your heart's content.

JimP

Looks interesting. But I have specific constellations in mind that random wont show.

jslayton

Feel free, Simon.

One of the advantages of the FT technique shown in that article is that you can force the background stars to be fairly dim (or even nonexistent) and then use a brush to paint in specific stars (a 1 pixel brush with one click per star should do it). Those can be used as reference marks to draw lines and place markers as you reproject the skyglobe. If that lazy FT developer would get off his backside and implement lines, text and symbols for FT then it would be a lot easier, but I hear he's a bit overbusy these days.