Wedding Star Map — the Sky the Night You Said “I Do”
Your wedding happened under a specific sky. This tool recomputes it — every star over the venue at the moment of your vows — and puts your names beneath it.
Make your wedding star map
Free, in your browser — no account, nothing uploaded. Free downloads carry a small watermark; a clean high-resolution print export is planned as a paid upgrade.
Enter the wedding date, the venue's city (or its exact coordinates for a country venue), and a moment: couples usually choose the ceremony time, the first dance, or simply midnight of the wedding night. Add your names as the title and a line like “The night we said ‘I do’” as the subtitle.
The ink-on-paper theme suits wedding décor — dark stars on warm white, closer to a letterpress print than a poster — and it is the cheap one to print and frame. The navy night theme is the dramatic alternative.
It also makes a strong first-anniversary gift: the traditional first-year material is paper.
How the map is computed
Your date, time and place are converted to a Julian Date and then to local sidereal time — the astronomer’s clock for “which way is the sky facing.” Each of the 1,630 stars in the Yale Bright Star Catalogue (every star brighter than magnitude 5.0, i.e. everything a good naked eye can see) is transformed to its altitude and azimuth at that exact moment, and everything above the horizon is projected onto the circular chart: zenith at the centre, horizon at the rim, north at the top — and east on the left, because a star map is read looking up, which mirrors east and west compared to a ground map.
The 89 constellation figures are drawn with the same math and clipped at the horizon. Star dots are scaled by real brightness (magnitude) and tinted by star colour. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and the page works offline once loaded.
Common questions
Which moment of the wedding should I use?
Any moment that means something: the processional, the vows, the first dance. The sky drifts only ~15° per hour, so anything that evening gives a similar chart — pick the moment, then let the caption say which one it was.
We married in the afternoon — does a star map still make sense?
Yes. The stars were above the horizon whether or not daylight hid them; the chart shows what was really there. Many couples use the evening of the wedding day instead, which is equally true to the date.
Can it show both our hometowns too?
Make more than one — the generator is free and unlimited. A common trio is: where you each grew up, plus where you married.