This is a program to produce a blank skyculture. Skyculture is a format used by the desktop planetarium program Stellarium to hold artwork for constellations. Skyculture format also has the advantages of simplicity, comprehensiveness, and being open, so it can be straightforwardly converted to other formats when needed.
Nevertheless, there is a certain amount of difficulty in producing a skyculture, and this project seeks to assist with that by providing tools to make a blank that generates the boilerplate of the format for you, as well as template images that an artist can use as guides in order to produce new constellation artwork.
This program is a work in progress. It is currently able to make a skyculture template of the 88 IAU constellations (including the special combinations Ophiuchus + Serpens and Argo Navis). Future work is planned to produce chart sets for other traditions which do not line up with the IAU constellations. Also, not all charts map to the sphere as well as they probably could, so I am continuing to tweak them.
If you would just like to download the set of charts to draw on and don't
care about the software that produced them, visit
the
project releases page and
download the newest version of skyculture-blank.zip.
To use the software to create your own charts, you will need to obtain some astronomical catalog data. On unix-like machines, make sure that you have git and wget, and do the following:
cd data
./git-clone-hyg-database
cd constellations-pbarbier
./fetch-constellation-data
cd ../..
On other platforms, or if git and wget are unavailable, refer to the source code of the two scripts mentioned above for the URLs at which to obtain the needed data.