Better close-up photos of the poster

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Sun is shining – here are much better close-up photos of the star map: Yes, yes, these are not professional either, but I am sure you’ll agree a far cry from the blurry shots I took in low-light conditions.

Sense of Scale

Humbling.

But, yes – it would be possible to map the entire Milky Way Galaxy this way. Any takers? ;-)

 

Milky Way Galaxy in Black and White

I decided to release the following image under the Creative Commons Attribution license. Please credit me with a link back to http://www.enderra.com – Happy mapping!

Click on the thumbnail above to get the original size at 4096×4096 pixels; it’s 6MB as a PNG file.

The image is based on a NASA image of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Poster-sized Star Map print

Got the A1 version of my star map. Again, as with the small test version, the photos simply don’t do it justice, but I had to post some anyway.

You can see some dice in one pic, and the small test print in two others, to compare the size. And, yes, I really need better lighting in this apartment.

But I’ve also learned two lessons more to the subject matter:

  1. I am very happy I did not edit the image – the test print seemed dark and the labels hard to read; on the A1 map both the color and the readability of the labels are absolutely perfect in my opinion.
  2. It was an excellent choice to go with matte photo paper, over the glossy stuff.

I’ll get two A3 matte versions printed in a few days (Saturday) as well. One is going to go to Lex Mosgrove, because he claimed that he wanted one.

 

 

Star Map – Final Version – And a Look Back

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So, I’m finally done. I created my own star map, covering Human Space as I will cover it in my science fiction series. This image was scaled down considerably; the original is at 200dpi – 6622×4677 pixel. It’s 72MB in … Continue reading

Star Map – Test Print

The test print of my star map came out really nicely. I went ahead and ordered an A1-sized poster. I did order Matte instead of glossy paper, and I hope this doesn’t change things too much. At worst I’ll be 20 Euro poorer. The small print, by the way, was a mere 4€.

Unfortunately, my apartment is too dark and my only camera – an iPhone – is not really that great, so the photos didn’t come out so well:


Note the CD for size comparisons.

I will take new photos on the weekend – during daylight – and of course once I get the poster.

Starmap Update, Jan 11th

Phew. Another long, long evening working on this map. It now has 401 named systems, I’ve also added a bunch of other stuff since the last update.

And a cropped zoom:

I do not even want to think about how much time this took me to create. But I am really happy with how this is turning out!

Starmap Styletest Update – Jan 9th

Spent probably six hours updating this thing, and looking at it I wonder… why did that take me so long? I did experiment a little with regional / sector labels; and of course placing all those stars is actually much more work than it looks like.

Closeup:

And the entire map, downsized from the original:

Both were saved as JPG as well, so there’s some loss of detail from that as well.

As always, I’ve also updated the thread on the Cartographers’ Guild.

 

Starmap Styletest Update

Updated WIP. I’d love to hear your feedback on the “sector names”:

Also, here’s the entire map:

Still needs work… much work. But it’s “getting there”. By the way, there’s also a thread on the Cartographers’ Guild for this map.

Another Star Map Style Test

What do you guys think of this?

Orion Spur Style TestThe star systems are only temporary, and this is just a section of a larger map.

Uses brushes by Sakura.