← THE SKY PRIVACY TERMS CREDITS
Last updated 25 August 2026
This sky is built from public astronomical data. It exists because people spent lifetimes measuring these things and then gave the results away.
HYG Database v4.2 — compiled by David Nash from the Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star and Gliese catalogues, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Star positions, distances, brightness and colours come from here.
IAU Working Group on Star Names — the official names of stars, and the NameExoWorlds campaigns, through which 164 planets and their stars were named by people in 121 countries.
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia (exoplanet.eu) — masses, radii, orbital periods, discovery dates and methods.
Cantat-Gaudin, T., Anders, F., Castro-Ginard, A., et al. (2020), Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters, Astronomy & Astrophysics 640, A1 — distances, sizes, ages and member counts of the open clusters a message passes on its way.
Accessed through the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (DOI: 10.26093/cds/vizier). The original description of the VizieR service was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics Supplement Series 143, 23 (2000).
BlackCAT — Corral-Santana, J. M., Casares, J., Muñoz-Darias, T., et al. (2016), BlackCAT: A catalogue of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray transients, Astronomy & Astrophysics 587, A61 — positions, distances and masses of the black holes offered as destinations.
OpenNGC by Mattia Verga, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 — positions and common names, sizes and orientations of the galaxies, nebulae and clusters drawn on the deep sky map. Distances for galaxies are derived from the redshifts listed there; all other deep sky distances are taken from the published literature and are rounded, since many of them are uncertain.
To everyone who has ever measured a parallax, and to the people of 121 countries who chose the names on this map.