Charting the Heavens

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last several years, whenever I had some spare time, I worked on a little project to chart the 88 constellations in Python. I was heavily inspired by several different people online. Most of the impetus came from the work of two different people: and . Those two existing projects (the latter being on an indefinite hiatus) really helped me out, both with their code and their knowledge of existing databases. –>

I have also always been interested in the mythology and history of the constellations, and I wanted some way to incorporate that. I decided that these charts could be the impetus for writing up an “Observer’s Guide” to the constellations, complete with information about the history/mythos, meteor showers, stars, and deep sky objects for each constellation. This part of the project probably took the longest, but eventually I got it done!

Below is a small gallery of a few constellations so you can get an idea of what the charts look like. I tried to emulate the Sky & Telescope charts that are found on the Wikipedia pages for each constellation. The full Python code, databases used, and all the discussion can be found on . The “Observer’s Guide” can also be found there as a PDF. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Python | Ray Garner

Charting the Heavens