Birth Star Map: Name, Weight, Length
Nursery shops sell this print as a paid, made-to-order poster: the night sky over the hospital, the baby’s name and the numbers from the birth card. Here you make it yourself, see it before anything is printed, and download it at full size for nothing.
Make the birth poster
Free, no account, nothing to buy. The baby’s name, weight and length are under More text in the generator, or type them in the form at the top.
What goes on the poster
- The sky itself. Every naked-eye star above the birth town at that minute, with the constellation figures, the Milky Way, the Moon in its real phase and any planet that was up. Computed from a star catalogue for that date and place, not a stock picture of stars.
- One row for the baby. Name, weight, length and, if you tick it, the time of birth, joined by small dots in that order: Noah’s reads Noah · 3,450 g · 51 cm · 04:20. Each part is optional, and a box left empty leaves no gap or stray dot behind.
- Your own words above that row (“Welcome to the world” in the example), and below it the town, the date and the latitude and longitude.
The numbers stay the ones you typed
Birth cards come in different units, and families care about them. The poster never converts or rounds: type 3450 in grams and it prints “3,450 g”, type 3.40 in kilograms and the trailing zero stays, pick pounds and ounces and 7 and 10 print as “7 lb 10 oz”; length is centimetres or inches, 20.5 in staying 20.5 in. When you choose a town from the list, the units start on that country’s habit (pounds, ounces and inches for the United States, pounds, ounces and centimetres for the United Kingdom, grams and centimetres elsewhere) until you pick one yourself. The German and Danish generators write 3.450 g, the way those languages group digits.
Twins, siblings and a later baby
For twins, make the poster once, then change the name, the numbers and the minute and download it again: two births a few minutes apart give almost the same sky, and the row underneath is what tells them apart. Once there is more than one child, the family star map puts each child’s birth sky side by side on one sheet, and each disc takes its own weight and length.
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 only know roughly when the baby was born. How much does the minute matter?
Less than people expect. The whole sky turns about 15° an hour around the pole star, one degree every four minutes. On Noah’s 50 × 70 cm print, an hour later moves the stars straight overhead by about 1.5 to 2 cm and Arcturus, lower in the east, by about 3 cm; Sirius, only 6° up at 04:20, would have set. So ten minutes either way changes almost nothing you could see, while an hour shifts the low stars noticeably. The birth record normally gives the minute; if you only know “early morning”, pick your best guess, and leave the time off the row so the poster does not claim more than you know.
Why is the sky drawn on the birth town's clock and not ours?
Because the time on a birth record is local clock time, and the same instant is a different hour elsewhere. The generator takes the time you type as the clock in the birth town on that date, with its time zone and any summer time, and works out the moment from that. Noah’s 04:20 in Amsterdam was 03:20 UTC and 22:20 the evening before in New York. A grandparent abroad should still type the hospital’s time, not their own.
Can I print it for the nursery wall at home, or should I use a print shop?
Both work. At home, A4, US Letter and A3 print on an ordinary printer, and the button for printing on A4 / Letter sheets splits a 50 × 70 cm poster into pages you tape together. For one large sheet, download the PDF, which is written at the poster’s true size, and take it to any print shop or photo service; ask for no scaling (100 %). The size list runs from photo-print sizes through frame sizes (8 × 10 in to 18 × 24 in) to posters up to 70 × 100 cm, so the print fits an off-the-shelf frame without trimming. The navy theme covers the sheet in ink, which a home printer feels; Ink on paper and Noir (black on white) use a fraction of it.
Will the Moon from that night be on it?
Yes, if it was above the horizon: drawn where it stood, in its real phase, with a line under the chart naming the phase and how much of it was lit. On Noah’s night the Moon was full and half-way up in the west with Jupiter just beside it. If the Moon was below the horizon, the line says so rather than drawing it. For a print of the Moon alone, large and turned as it hung, see the Moon on the night you were born.