Are you looking for an incredibly unique and thoughtful gift to commemorate a special date like an anniversary or birthday? You might want to check out this custom star map. It’s a fantastic gift for anyone that you share a special date with.
This is essentially a poster that lets you recreate the night sky on that date and shows the stars and constellations as they appeared over a specific place at a specific day and time.
It’s a pretty cool idea.
To create your own personalized star map you start off by selecting your date, time and location. You can even enter specific latitude and longitude coordinates.
You also have the option of including constellations, planets, constellation or planet names and even the Milky Way itself. So anyone will be able to identify their favorite stars, planets or constellations.
The data comes from scientifically accurate maps from the Hipparcos satellite. That name is an acronym for HIgh Precision PARallax COllecting Satellite.
The Hipparcos satellite was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1989 and created a highly accurate catalog of more that 118,200 stars. The data was all published in 1997.
Creating your Own Personalized Star Map
The editor itself is very easy to use with lots of different style options. For the overall shape you can select either a circle for a more standard look or a heart shape if you’re after something a little more romantic looking.
There are also tons of different color options for the background, stars, and space section. You can go with a standard sort of black space and white stars or change it up to something a lot more colorful if that’s the look you’re going after.
There’s an option to show constellations which will add little lines connecting the starts to make them easy to identify and you can include the constellation name as well.
If you’re lucky enough that there happened to be a planet overhead on your special date you also have the option of adding text to point that out as well.
There are also a few other options to show things like the Milky Way, grid lines or the ecliptic.
The only information you need to enter into the editor is the place, date, time and a custom message if you want to have that included.
There are a couple of font options like a regular san-serif one or a fancier handwritten script option, again, for if you’re looking for something a bit more romantic.
You can choose whether or not you want to display the location, date and coordinates on the poster as well.
Printing Options
There are a lot of options when it comes to printing your personalized prints too. You can print these star maps in the following sizes: 16X12, 36X24, and 24X18 inches or 100X70, 70X50, and 40X30 cm.
They come printed on a high-quality poster stock that makes for easy framing. You can get a framed or a canvas version as well if you don’t want to mess with the framing part yourself.
One feature that I absolutely love is that they’ll send you a digital file that you can print yourself locally. It’s a high-resolution jpeg image already formatted for the specific size you requested. You can copy that to a USB drive, bring it to any local printing shop and they’ll be able to print it on whatever kind of paper you want.
This is really a thoughtful gift so if you’re looking to commemorate the birth of a child, a wedding anniversary or anything like that you can’t go wrong with something like this.