Sky culture Western (sternenkarten.com)

Article written because of my pull request to kstars to integrate the constellation lines of „Meinen kleine Sternenkarten“ into kstars.

My little star maps… Why?

Do you know what problem I had when I went out at night searching the stars? I didn’t know the constellations and the names of the stars.

Well, I found Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and Orion, but the other constellations…?

One day, I decided to photograph my own star maps and paint the constellations inside them in my own way. A first hesitant attempt brought the nightsky closer to me and confirmed my plan.

So, these sites grow up on „Meine kleine Sternenkarten“.

And now, using the constellations from „Meine kleine Sternenkarten“ I can easy find the constellations and stars in the sky, I´m looking for.

My constellation lines

The idea of painting constellations in another than the common way, came up after reading the book „The stars, a new way to see them“ from H.A. Rey.

So I painted some of the constellations in the way, H.A. Rey did. Other constellations, which looked better in the standard way (Western sky culture) in my eyes, I painted in this standard way. And for still others I created complete new pictures.

Examples

• Standard vs. my constellation lines
  https://sternenkarten.com/zwischenspiele/sternbilder-malen/
• A royal family
  My interpretation of Andromeda, Kassiopeia, Kepheus and Perseus
  https://sternenkarten.com/sternbild-andromeda/

Constellations in astronomy programs

I use two astronomy programs for observing the the night sky and planing the observations:

• Stellarium
  A great astronomy programm with a better simulation of the night sky than kstars. I use it for planing my observations.
  I can switch Stellarium to sky culture Western (H.A. Rey), which show the constellations in the way, H.A.Ray painted them. That´s fine for me.
• Kstars
  A great astronomy program for teleskope control, for controlling other hardware like camera or motorfocus with indi.drivers and a great program for plate solving. Contains a astrophoto-suite (EKOS).
  Kstars can be switched to some different sky cultures, but not to the one fromH.A Rey

Kstars and my constellation lines

I tweaked my local copy of kstars for using the constellation lines from My little starmaps.

This works like a charm. But perhaps, other users want to use my constellation lines as well. so I created a pull request to kstars.

Let´s see, what will happen…

Edit

Kstars 3.3.9 is released and includes now an option to show the constellations how I paint them on „Meine kleinen Sternenkarten“.