The first published edition of OpenSkyAtlas: 101 A4 pages, 63 main charts and 15
close-ups covering the whole sky, stars to magnitude 8.0 and around 1,500
deep-sky objects drawn at their true size and orientation. All four languages —
English, French, Spanish, German — are in every one of these files.
openskyatlas-standard.pdf — the one to print. Black on white, for the desk
and for the night.
openskyatlas-field.pdf — the same book with its ink reversed, white stars
on a black ground. Not for the printer: a full-black page empties a cartridge to
no purpose. It is for the screen you take outside, a tablet or a phone beside the
telescope, where a white page would cost you half an hour of dark adaptation.
openskyatlas-mirror.pdf — for observers using a star diagonal, which flips
the sky left to right. Its charts are reflected to match what the eyepiece shows,
the text stays the right way round, and east sits on the right.
Printing
Print at 100%, with any "fit to page" or "shrink to fit" option turned off,
and measure the 100 mm calibration bar on the Telrad page with a ruler before you
trust any scale. A page printed at 96% will send you to the wrong star.
What was checked
Every page passes the build's own inspection: no overlapping labels, none cut by
the neatline, none below the type floor, nothing but greys, and every object the
index claims verified against what was actually drawn. All 110 Messier objects
are named somewhere in the book. The chart plan covers the whole sky with at
least 8° of overlap between neighbours, on 10,000 sampled points. All 237 QR
codes in the three editions were rendered, decoded, and resolved against the
pages they open.
No copy has yet been through a full printing campaign. If a chart is too
crowded, a label sits where it should not, or something is simply wrong at the
eyepiece, it is worth saying — the way you would tell a friend: which chart,
which object, what is wrong with it.
Licence
Charts and text are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: print, copy and adapt them for any
non-commercial purpose, credit OpenSkyAtlas and the catalogues, and pass on the
same freedom. For commercial use, ask. The catalogues the atlas is drawn from are
credited one by one, with their licences, in the book's own colophon.
The date on the cover is the version: this is the build of 2026-08-08.