Charter is a star chart generator that takes a center point and outputs a chart of this aera of interest in the style of the IAU/Sky & Telescope constellation charts.
Optionally, it can take field-of-view, projection, size, and limiting magnitude options. See below (or charter --help) for a full list of options.
Charter bundles the HYG database, by David Nash, and OpenNGC by Mattia Verga, both of which are CC BY-SA licensed. The bundled copies of the HYG and OpenNGC databases have been modified to include only the fields used by Charter to reduce their size.
Charter is based on an earlier project that eventually became observation-charts, which is more interactive.
Right now Charter is just available from source, and requires a working Rust toolchain. Visit https://rustup.rs/ to get it set up.
Install Charter directly from this repository with:
cargo install --git https://github.com/willbarton/charter
Given a center RA and declination coordinate, for example:
charter --ra 5:30:00.00 --dec 5:0:0.00 -o orion.svg
Charter will output an SVG chart like this:
-o,--out <OUT>Output SVG path (required)--css <CSS>Optional CSS override file path; if omitted, Charter's embedded CSS is used--width <WIDTH>Output image width in pixels (default600)--height <HEIGHT>Output image height in pixels (default800)
Positioning and projection:
--ra <RA>Center RA either as hour:minute:second (e.g. "5:35:17.3") or decimal degrees ("83.821") (required)--dec <DEC>Center Dec as degree:minute:second (e.g. "-5:23:28") or decimal degrees ("-5.391") (required)--fov <FOV>Field of view (in degrees, default40)--projection <PROJECTION>Type of projectionto draw, eithergnomonic,stereographic,spherical, oraltaz(defaultgnomonic)
Astronomical drawing:
--limit-star-mag <LIMIT_STAR_MAG>Dimmest magnitude stars to draw (default6.5)--limit-object-mag <LIMIT_OBJECT_MAG>Dimmest magnitude objects to draw (default10)--object-scale <OBJECT_SCALE>Scale multiplier for object symbol size relative to its physical size and/or magnitude (default1.25)--step-ra-deg <STEP_RA_DEG>RA gridlines step in degrees (default15)--step-dec-deg <STEP_DEC_DEG>Dec gridlines step in degrees (default10)
Astronomical data:
--hyg-path <HYG_PATH>Optional path override for stars (HYG format expected)--ngc-path <NGC_PATH>Optional path override for deep-sky objects (OpenNGC format expected)--constellations-path <CONSTELLATIONS_PATH>Optional path override for constellations vectors CSV
Charter is licensed under the GPL Version 3.