A Star Map Gift You Can Send as a Link
A framed print takes a week and a shop. A gift link takes a minute: make the poster of their night, press Copy gift link, and send it in a message. When they tap it, their phone shows the sky over that town turning from sunset to the minute that matters, and then the finished poster, ready to save.
Make the poster, then copy its gift link
Free, no account, nothing to buy. Copy gift link is under More formats & sharing, below the poster.
Sending one, step by step
- Make the poster as usual: their date, time and town, a title and a subtitle, any theme and size.
- Open More formats & sharing under the poster and press Copy gift link. The page confirms it was copied.
- Paste it into a text, an email or a card’s QR-code generator.
What happens on their side
The link opens the generator with no form at all, the poster filling the screen. For six seconds the chart runs from that evening’s sunset to the poster’s minute, slowing as it arrives, with the line “The sky from sunset to 03:12” above it. Then it stops on the exact poster you made, byte for byte what your own permalink draws, with two choices underneath: Download this poster (the 300 dpi PNG) and Make your own star map, which opens the editor on a copy they can change without touching yours. Where the Sun did not set that night, or did not rise the next morning (near the poles), it plays from noon instead. A daytime moment, before that evening’s sunset, has no evening to play, and a phone set to reduce motion skips the playback; both show the poster at once.
Nothing is stored anywhere. The date, place, caption and theme are written into the link itself, which is why it is long (about 150 characters for the example above) and why it never expires or depends on an account.
Or send the night as a video
For a story or a chat that plays clips inline, pick the Story (9:16) or Square post size and the same fold offers a video download: 1080 × 1920 or 1080 × 1080 pixels, 30 frames a second, nine seconds of the sky turning from sunset to the moment and one second resting on the poster, silent. It records MP4 (H.264) where the browser can, WebM otherwise, and it needs a browser with MediaRecorder: current Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and Safari from 14.1. Keep the tab in front for the ten seconds it records. It is made from the one-sky chart; a two-sky or Moon poster goes as a still or a gift link.
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
Does a gift link expire?
No. The whole poster is encoded in the link, so there is nothing on a server to delete or time out. It opens for as long as the star map itself is online, and every link minted before a new option was added still opens the poster it opened then.
Can the person I send it to edit it?
They get their own copy: Make your own star map opens the editor on the same poster, and whatever they change makes a new link. The link you sent keeps showing your version.
Can I still give a printed one?
Yes. Download the PDF at the frame’s size (50 × 70 cm, say) and take it to a print shop, or print it at home across A4 or Letter sheets; then send the gift link too, so the night plays on their phone before the frame arrives.