Transparency is the authority
A Painted Skies chart is not a mood or a decoration. It is the real arrangement of the heavens over one place on Earth at one instant in time — recovered by computation, and shown plainly. Here is exactly how.
Your moment
A date, a time, and a place. We geocode the place to a latitude and longitude and resolve its timezone, then convert your local wall-clock time to a single exact instant in UTC.
The stars
We place every naked-eye star (to magnitude 6.5 — roughly 9,000 of them) from the Hipparcos catalogue, the most precise all-sky astrometric survey. Their catalogue coordinates are real measured positions, not artistic scatter.
The rotation
We compute the local apparent sidereal time for your instant and longitude, then rotate each star into horizon coordinates — altitude and azimuth — for your exact spot on Earth. Stars below the horizon are dropped; the zenith sits at the centre of the disc.
The Moon & planets
The Moon's exact phase and the positions of Mercury through Saturn come from NASA/JPL's DE440 ephemeris via Skyfield. That's why a chart of a total solar eclipse computes to a New Moon — because it was one.
The projection
The visible hemisphere is drawn with a stereographic projection onto a disc — the same projection the great celestial atlases used — so constellation figures keep their shape.
The engraving
The margin always prints the place, the date, the local time, the exact coordinates, and the source catalogue. We show our work. That transparency is the authority.
Astronomy, and tradition — kept apart
The stars, the Moon and the planets are computed fact. The birth-flower companion is a tradition — the flower folklore assigns to your birth month — and it is always labelled as such. If you add the optional natal layer, we present the planetary positions as fact and any interpretation explicitly as tradition. We commemorate; we never predict. There are no claims here about destiny, fortune, or the future.