Star Chart Software

[Grant]

Hi guys,

Been searching for some software that will generate star charts of a given area of the sky.. can't seem to find anything that will work how I want it to!

Basically, I want to be able to display a star chart of an area next to peoples pictures of that area on the UK Astronomers website - this will help other people to find the object and also put it into context - the long-term idea would be to automatically tell what an image is based on the star pattern and so classify it and make it easily searchable....

The trouble is I can't find any command line software which will produce star charts as images - I know there are star chart websites so the software must exist, any ideas?

Thanks in advance,

Grant

[lunator]

Grant

I use cartes du Ciel.

This allows you to produce charts and save then on you computer as Gif, jepg, windows metafile or bitmap.

could you modify the code?

[dayglowill]

Is this the sort of thing you are looking for?

Ciclope Astro:

http://www.ciclope.info/tools/planetario/index_en.shtml

Is "a planetarium application based on Web 2.0 techniques only", and open source, the links page looks like it could be useful.

Wikisky:

http://www.wikisky.org/

"have several API's that will let you to use SKY-MAP data in different ways" at:

http://server8.wikisky.org/api?locale=EN

All the best,

Will.

[dph1nm]

pp3 enables you produce pdf star charts from the command line. Needs latex and ghostscript installed though, but has the advantage of being very easily customisable. It produced the constellation charts for Wikipedia.

NigelM

[Grant]

Thanks guys!

Just collected a bunch of bookmarks to go over in detail - a couple look very promising!

Thank you