The Night We Met — an Anniversary Star Map
Remembering a night together? The wedding page draws the same chart with the Moon large above it, lit and tilted as it hung that night. Sky and Moon of a couple’s night →
The bar, the party, the train platform — wherever it happened, there was a sky over it. Rebuild it from three facts: the date, roughly when, and where.
Recreate your night
Free, in your browser, with no account and nothing to buy. The SVG, the 300 dpi PNG and the PDF (a real page of the size you pick, from 21 × 29.7 cm to 70 × 100 cm) are each the complete poster.
An anniversary star map works because it is specific. Not “a starry sky” — that sky: the constellations that stood over that city at that hour, computed from a star catalog rather than painted on.
Getting the details right
- The after-midnight trap: if the night ran past midnight, the moment you remember may belong to the next calendar date. “The night of June 14th” at 1 a.m. is June 15th on the form.
- Place beats precision: use the city where it happened. Street-level coordinates change the chart imperceptibly; the city changes it a lot.
- Two nights, one poster: choose Two skies under Layout and then A different night to put the night you met and, say, your wedding night side by side, each with its own place and date line under one shared title. Start a two-night poster.
- Apart on the anniversary: Same moment draws one instant over two towns and works out the second town’s local time for you, summer time included: 21:00 on 24 December 2024 in Copenhagen was 15:00 in New York. Open that example.
- Time can be approximate: the sky drifts ~15° per hour. “Around eleven” is plenty.
What the chart draws
The chart holds the 1,630 stars brighter than magnitude 5.0 and the 89 constellation figures, and the Milky Way is drawn as a soft band. The Moon is drawn in its real phase, and left off when it was below your horizon. The five naked-eye planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, are drawn where they stood. The Sun is drawn too whenever it was up, and the caption says whether your moment was daylight, twilight or full dark: the stars are always drawn where they stood, even when daylight or twilight hid them. So is an eclipse, if your moment falls inside one. Uranus, Neptune and 133 deep-sky objects are one switch away: tick Deep-sky objects and the chart marks the Messier objects and southern showpieces and adds Uranus and Neptune (see them over London on a winter evening). Great comets since 1900 can be added (Hale-Bopp over London, 1997). Not drawn: faint comets and satellites, whose orbits this tool does not compute. Every position is carried to your date by precession. Not modelled: the stars’ own proper motion. A date before 15 October 1582 is read in the Julian calendar. It all runs in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and the downloads are complete and free. Accuracy, print sizes and privacy, answered in full.
Common questions
We don't remember the exact time — does it matter?
Not much. Across a single evening the visible constellations change slowly; an hour of uncertainty rotates the chart slightly without changing its character. Pick the hour that feels right — or slide through the night with the slider under the chart, sunset to sunrise in five-minute steps, and stop where the sky matches what you remember.
We met in one city but live in another — which one do I enter?
The place where the moment happened. The map is a portrait of that night there, not of where the print will hang.
It was cloudy that night. Is the map still honest?
Yes — the chart shows the stars that stood above the clouds. They were there whether or not you could see them, which is rather the point.