Night Constellations

THE NIGHT SKY 

This map shows every single star visible from Earth, on the darkest night with the clearest sky. The map also includes all of the brightest galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters from W.H. Finlay’s "Concise Catalog of Deep-sky Objects". 

For thousands of years, humans have looked up at the stars in the night sky for navigation, divination, and storytelling. Before the invention of telescopes, ancient Egyptians used the bright star Sirius to predict the annual flooding of the Nile river. Ancient Polynesians navigated by the stars through the open ocean for hundreds of kilometers.

This map shows every star that might be visible to the human eye on the darkest night. It also includes many deep-sky objects such as galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters that are similarly visible from Earth. 

Because the Earth wobbles slightly around its axis, the position of the stars appears to change over time when seen from Earth. This map shows the position of each star on New Year's Day of the year 2000. These star movements are large enough to see throughout human history. In the ancient divination tradition of astrology, a person's sun sign describes where the Sun was located when they were born. But because of the shifting stars, the sun signs of people born today are off by about one zodiac sign when using the traditional date calculations from 2000 years in the past.