Charting Resources

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Directions

• Winter Splendor
• Spring and Early Summer
• Late Summer and Fall

PDFs for Mapping the Entire Sky

Lambert projections:

• Lambert Azimuthal Projection for the celestial poles — declinations greater than 39° (north celestial pole) or less than -39° (south celestial pole)
• Lambert Cylindrical Projection for declinations from approximately -51° to 51°

Fully 7.5° of overlap from either side of declination 45° has deliberately been created between the projections. Thus the stars from declination 37.5° to 52.5° will appear on both the azimuthal and the cylindrical charts.

The PDFs were created in a Mathematica notebook.

The Tissot Indicatrices

Understanding the distorted salmon-colored circles:

• Tissot Indicatrices for Various Projections

A sphere cannot be flattened without distortion. The “indicatrices” show what circles on the sphere have been crushed into.

Two Finished Charts

My version of two finished charts with connecting lines in the constellations. Also with the addition of the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Pleiades dotted in around Alcyone:

• Winter Splendor completed (1.2 MB jpeg, may be slow to load)
• Spring and Early Summer completed (900 MB jpeg, may be slow to load)

Some Famous Fanciful Charts

From the Flamsteed-Fortin Atlas, 1795 edition (scanned and graciously placed on the web by G. M. Caglieris):

• Andromeda, Perseus, and the Triangle
• Taurus and Orion

From Uranometria, 1603:

• Leo as Depicted by Bayer in Uranometria