Cartes du Ciel
Sky Charts 

Home page : http://www.astrosurf.org/astropc

This program enables you to draw sky charts, making use of the data in 16 catalogs of stars and nebulae. 
In addition the position of planets, asteroids and comets are shown.

The purpose of this program is to prepare different sky maps for a particular observation. 
A large number of parameters help you to choose specifically or automatically which catalogs to use, the colour and the dimension of stars and nebulae, the representation of planets, the display of labels and coordinate grids, the superposition of pictures, the condition of visibility and more.
All these features make this celestial atlas more complete than a conventional planetarium. 
Please look at the catalog descriptions in the documentation for explanation about the catatog used and how to obtain the extra catalog for use with the program. For most of them you must use a binary version available from the web site. 

Documentation

I originally developed this program for my personal use, because I like to adapt my tools to my needs. In my opinion the functionality of Sky Charts might be of interest to amateur astronomers or students. Therefore I decided to distribute it as freeware. I feel that you should rather invest your money in buying a good eyepiece than to waste it on software!

"Sky charts" is a  freeware. You can freely install and use an unlimited number of copies for your personal usage or redistribute it on any support under the restriction that you must not modify it and that you have to include all the documentation files. 
Any commercial use is however prohibited. 

For the conditions and citations of the single catalogs, please refer to the original descriptions in the files ".TXT" in the  subdirectory "CAT\". 

I would like to thank the Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg as well as the Astronomical Data Center who make accessible valuable astronomical catalogs to any amateur astronomer.

Sky Charts uses catalog extracts provided by these two institutions:

5/50	Bright Star Catalogue 5th Revised Ed.	Hoffleit+ 1991
5/102	SKY2000 - Master Star Catalog Version 2	Sande+ 1998
1/197A	Tycho Input Catalogue Revised version	Egret+ 1992
1/239	The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues	ESA 1997
1/259	The Tycho-2 Catalogue	Hog+ 2000
1/220	The HST Guide Star Catalog	Lasker+1992
1/237	The Washington Visual Double Star Catalog	USNO 2000
2/214	General Catalog of Variable Stars	Kholopov+ 1998
2/219	New Catalogue of Suspected Variable Stars Supplement	Kazarovets+ 1998
7/118	NGC 2000.0	Dreyer 1888, Sky Publishing ed. Sinnott1988
7/155	Third Reference Cat. of Bright Galaxies	de Vaucouleurs+1991
7/119	Catalogue of Principal Galaxies	Paturel+ 1999
5/84	Strasbourg-ESO Cat. of Galactic Planetary Nebulae	Acker+1992
7/9	Lynds' Catalogue of Bright Nebulae	Lynds 1965
7/202	Globular Clusters in the Milky Way	Harris 1997
7/92A	Open Cluster Data 5th Edition	Lynga 1987
6/79	Lunar Solution ELP 2000-82B	Chapront-Touze+ 1988
6/87	Planetary Ephemerides	Chapront+ 1996
6/49	Constellation Boundary Data	Davenhall+ 1989

I also would like to mention the US Naval Observatory who kindly supplies the USNO-SA1.0 CD-ROM,  the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams for the elements of comets and asteroids and their permission to distribute these files, and Lowell Observatory for the asteroids elements.

The Saguaro Astronomy Club distribute is Database Version 7.1

Michael. G. Christensen produce the FITS table with Uranometria 2000 charts boundaries.

Programming

This program is entirely written in DELPHI 4. 

Calculations of the ephemerides of planets between 1900 and 2100 are based on " Ephemerides of planets between 1900 and 2100 Chapront-Francou, Bureau des Longitudes 1996 ". The program serie96.f was rewritten in Pascal and include in a DLL.

Planets calculation between -3000 and +3000 are based on plan404 by Steve Moshier, a DLL interface this C program.

Calculations of the ephemerides of the Moon are based on " Lunar Solution ELP 2000-82B Chapront-Touze, Bureau des Longitudes 1988". The program elp82b.f was rewritten in Pascal and include in a DLL.

Planets satellites calculation between 1997 and 2020 use posxy by J.-E. Arlot, Ch. Ruatti, D.T. Vu et  W.Thuillot, Bureau des Longitudes. The program diffpos.f was rewritten in Pascal and include in a DLL.

Many calculations are based on the essential "Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus".

RealSky® CD support use a library developed by Bill Gray of Project Pluto.

Some graphic files format use the library " NviewLib.dll " by K. Nishita.

Some graphic components use the Delphi library RXLIB.

Support for GZIP compression format use ZLIB by Jean-Loup Gailly and Mark Adler.

Installation files have been produced using the freeware version of "Install Maker" by ClickTeam.

I will to thank specially all the people who translate the program in different language.
 

French	Patrick Chevalley
English	Patrick Chevalley, Luca Crivelli
Italian	Luca Crivelli, Lorenzo Lodi
German	Luca Crivelli, Martin Schoenball
Spanish	Enric Ollé
Catalan	Antoni Clavell
Dutch	Arjen Hofland
Portuguese	Hugo D. Valentim
Thai	Wiphu Rujopakarn
Polish	Tomasz Sciezor
Czech	Ondrej Subrt
Romanian	Robert Panduru
Hungarian	Lorant Kiss
Serbian	Aleksandar Zorkic

Many thanks to Luca Crivelli and Greg Roberts for their help with the development of the program.