These sky maps were made using the freeware UNIX program
"starchart", from Alan Paeth and Craig Counterman, with
some postprocessing by Stuart Levy.  You're free to use them
however you wish.

There are five equatorial maps: three covering the equatorial
strip from declination -60 to +60 degrees, corresponding
roughly to the evening sky in northern winter (eq1),
spring (eq2), and summer/autumn (eq3),
plus maps covering the north and south polar areas
to declination about +/- 25 degrees.

Grid lines are drawn at every 15 degrees of declination,
and every hour (= 15 degrees at the equator) of right ascension.

The equatorial-strip maps use a simple rectangular projection;
this shows constellations near the equator with their
true shape, but those at declination +/- 30 degrees are
stretched horizontally by about 15%, and those at the extreme
60-degree edge are plotted twice as wide as you'll see them
on the sky.   The sinusoidal curve spanning the equatorial strip
is, of course, the Ecliptic -- the path of the Sun (and
approximately that of the planets) through the sky.


The polar maps are plotted with stereographic projection.
This preserves shapes of small constellations, but enlarges
them as they get farther from the pole; at declination 45
degrees they're about 17% oversized, and at the extreme
25-degree edge about 40% too large.

These charts plot stars down to magnitude 5, along with a few of
the brighter deep-sky objects -- mostly star clusters and nebulae.
Many stars are labelled with their Bayer Greek-letter names.

Also here are similarly-plotted maps, based on galactic
coordinates.  The midline of the strip maps is the plane of our
Milky Way galaxy.

Unlike the ecliptic, which matters only within our solar system, the
Milky Way plane would be important to observers on any of the hundreds
of billions of stars in our galaxy.  It's also important to Earth-based
observers, as the Milky Way's structure determines where in the sky we
can find various types of deep-sky objects: for example, open star
clusters, and "planetary" and gaseous nebulae are concentrated toward
the galactic plane; globular star clusters appear all over the sky,
with more of them toward the galactic center; and Milky Way dust,
concentrated in the galactic plane, obscures distant objects in
and beyond the plane, so most external galaxies appear well above or
below the Milky Way plane.

If you have any questions about the maps, or would
like the tools I used so you can make others of your own,
contact me:
    Stuart Levy, slevy@ncsa.uiuc.edu
    January, 2002