Trying to find a sky map with star coordinates

CalicaCalica Registered User regular
There are a handful of websites where you can generate a custom sky map for a given time and place. I'm looking for a way to do that, except get the coordinates of every star that appears in the sky, so I can make a custom version of this thing: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/celestarium

It's frustrating because the websites themselves must be doing that math in order to generate the image in the first place, but it's all done server-side and not exposed to the browser at all... at least on the sites I've checked.

Literal (x, y) coordinates of the stars in the generated image would be ideal, but actual celestial coordinates would work too. I'd just need to do more math.

I downloaded the BSC5ra catalog and WCSTools, and I've been banging my head against the wall trying to get WCSTools to compile.* Either the documentation is missing some crucial steps, or there's something "everybody knows" about running this kind of thing on Windows that I don't know.

The catalog itself is a binary file using custom header and entry formats. I can view the contents easily enough, but I can't find detailed enough information on Fortran data types to let me convert Fortran binary/hex values to their decimal equivalents. The header is especially confusing: it says the second-to-last value is an integer*4 that equals -1, but that set of bytes is 00 00 00 01... which is just 1, no? (The next set of bytes is supposedly 32, and it is indeed 00 00 00 20, so that at least makes sense.)

I've been at this for days and I feel like the data I need is just out of reach via every avenue I try :|

*Make says "the system cannot find the file specified," and I can't figure out why. It's not the PATH variable; I tried that. Nowhere in any of the output does it tell me WHICH file it can't find, though, so who knows.

Posts

  • ceresceres When the last moon is cast over the last star of morning And the future has past without even a last desperate warningRegistered User, Moderator Mod Emeritus
    I wish I knew but damn that's cool.

    And it seems like all is dying, and would leave the world to mourn
  • PaladinPaladin Registered User regular
    This sounds like a project you can do in R, and sure enough there's a guide here

    Marty: The future, it's where you're going?
    Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
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