Printable finder charts for the Sun

by Dominic Ford
Use this form to generate customised finder-charts for planets, asteroids and comets. Charts can be generated over periods ranging from three days to three months.

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Limiting magnitude

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Credits

The charts above were generated using StarCharter, a command-line tool for producing vector-graphics charts of the night sky, written by the author and freely available for download.

The markers along each track are drawn at midnight each day, in UTC.

The paths of the planets are taken from the DE430 planetary ephemeris computed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Planetary positions were extracted from the DE430 files using EphemerisCompute, which was also written by the author, and is also freely available for download.

The positions of asteroids are calculated from orbital elements published by Ted Bowell of the Lowell Observatory. Comet positions are computed from orbital elements published by the Minor Planet Center (MPC).

Star positions and magnitudes were taken from the Hipparcos, Tycho, Tycho-2 and Gaia EDR3 catalogs.

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