Description

Suopte StellaSphaera is an application with which you can create a do-it-yourself (DIY) paper maquette of the night sky. The scale model fabricated from the generated PDF is an inside out celestial sphere, it is a skyglobe with several astronomical objects on it visible with naked eyes (88 constellations from the IAU catalogue and up to 4995 stars). Suopte StellaSphaera may be helpful for amateur astronomers who watch the night sky with naked eyes or low performance telescope learning about constellations and stars. It may also be recommended for paper maquette/scale model funs, who would like to enrich their collection with a special piece.

Prerequisites

You can fabricate your own scale model in 3 major steps (1. generating PDF; 2. printing; 3. assembly). The third step requires some manual skills. The whole procedure takes about 2-6 hours depending on the smoothness of the sphere. For the assembly of suopte StellaSphaera you'll need

• 5-20 sheets of A/4 format paper (depending on the diameter and smoothnes of the maquette)
• a printer
• a pair of scissors
• a ruler (preferably at least 30 cm long)
• some glue
• optional: a pair of calipers

Generating StellaSphaera PDF

Before generating the blueprint of the scale model you can adjust several parameters according to your needs (click Adjust preferences tab below), but if you are not sure, you can also use default settings for a 12 cm StellaSphaera model (click Generate PDF button).

Before generating StellaSphaera PDF please confirm that you are not a robot, but a human person by solving the image recognition test below.

Confirm human

Adjust preferences

Generate PDF

Scale model

Radius (mm)

Vertical segments (right ascension ring count)

Horizontal segments (declination ring count)

Color scheme

Black & white

Klepesta-Rükl

Night sky

Mirroring (negating right ascension values)

Stars

Draw stars

Star magnitude treshold

Star diameter

Draw star names

Star name magnitude treshold

Star name font size

Add star magnitudes in parentheses (requires Draw star names)

Constellations

Draw constellation outlines

Draw constellation boundaries

Draw constellation names

Constellation name font size

Lines

Draw declination rings

Draw declination labels

Draw right ascension rings

Draw right ascension labels

Draw equator

Draw ecliptic

Generate StellaSphaera PDF

Reset defaults

Image recognition:

Please type the word in the image into the input field
above without accents and all lowercase!

Instructions for the assembly in pictures

Sources

• Star coordinates and magnitude data from Hipparcos catalogue
• Constellation outlines and star names from the source of the spectacular, open source, cross-platform Stellarium planterium project
• Constellation boundaries from the VizieR catalogue
• PDF generation happens with FPDF and FPDF Geometric figures addon and several own suopte tricks
• And dosens of explanations from Wikipedia

Legal notices

The source code of this project is proprietary. The generated PDF documents can be used absolutely free of charge for non commercial purposes. Redistribution of the generated PDF files in any form (e.g.on other websites, printed sheets) is not allowed. All rights reserved.