Any online, free, starcharts, for both hemispheres?

Factual Questions
1

…complete with constellations, AND notation of stellar magnitudes?

It’s for a friend of a friend, who’s working on putting on putting an accurate night sky into a flight simulator. (If that’s of any help.)

I kind of have a feeling about what the answer’s going to be…but still, I thank y’all for your patience,
Ranchoth

2

I use Celestia, myself-
http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
an excellent 3d star simulator…

and sometimes
yoursky
http://www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/

or 3d universe
http://www.astronexus.com/3duniv/contents/main.html

3

Thanks for the links, eburacum. And I’m finally glad to find a decent map of neighboring star systems…

…but I think my friend needs something like a diagram/printout of the “skin” of astar globe/constellation globe. I’m not sure he’d have the patience to work from a full-3D simulation. :frowning:

4

If your friend needs data for a computer program, what he/she needs is a star catalog, i.e. a list of star coordinates. The SAO Catalog contains stars up to magnitude 9, so it has everything visible to the naked eye. That page also has a link to the PPM catalog which is a bit newer and more complete; I’ve never worked with it but it might be a better choice. You might want to add the Milky Way, the moon and the planets, but that’s about it. Any introductory book or web site on astronomy should have the formulas necessary to convert from stellar coordinates to terrestrial (altitude & azimuth), but ask again if you have any problems.

If you were making a planetarium software with closeup views I’d advise you to use the Hubble Guide Star Catalog, but that’s a complete overkill for a flight sim background.