Partridge Enterprises LLC

Credits

Night Atlas is by Partridge Enterprises LLC. It is free to download and use. Do not republish it or resell it. The terms are on the license page.

Engine

The app is built with the Godot Engine, under the MIT license. That license covers the engine, not Night Atlas.

Stars and catalogs

Bright-star positions and magnitudes follow Hipparcos and the Yale Bright Star Catalog. Constellation stick figures follow d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn. Fainter stars, down to about magnitude 6, come from that same star set.

The NGC and IC list used for search and for attaching a still is OpenNGC, by Mattia Verga, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The teaching sky draws the Messier objects plus a shorter set of notable NGC objects. Positions are standard catalog values.

Meteor-shower names, radiants, and typical peak nights follow International Astronomical Union usage. The hourly rates are dark-sky teaching numbers, not a live forecast.

The notes on the sky facts card are original to Night Atlas. They are not Stellarium text. Sizes, distances, and moon counts for the planets follow NASA’s public facts.

The Milky Way, the figures, and the menu

The Milky Way glow is original Night Atlas art. It is not a photograph.

The constellation figures are original gold outlines in the manner of an old atlas. The Mazalot cards are original gold line drawings for the Jewish twelve and for the Tanakh names Kimah, Kesil, and Ash. The Hebrew letters use Noto Sans Hebrew, from Google Fonts, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

The menu picture is original Night Atlas art of a backyard session. The man at the chart uses a likeness from photographs of Stephen Partridge.

Planets, the Moon, and deep-sky photographs

Planet pictures are public-domain works of the United States government: NASA, JPL-Caltech, and STScI. Mercury is from MESSENGER, Venus from Magellan, Mars from Viking, Jupiter from Juno, and Saturn from Cassini. NASA did not endorse Night Atlas.

Moon phases are stills from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (Ernie Wright, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter). The waxing crescent and the waning gibbous that open when you click the Moon are photographs by Stephen Partridge. Other phases zoom the NASA disc. NASA did not endorse Night Atlas.

The glass photographs of M31, M42, the Horsehead, NGC 6712, NGC 6888, the Veil, and the Iris are photographs by Stephen Partridge, taken with a Vaonis Stellina. The larger versions of those pictures are a separate download.

A few other Messier objects use Hubble and Spitzer stills from NASA, JPL-Caltech, and STScI. The remaining Messier pictures are Digitized Sky Survey 2 color, by STScI and NASA, served through the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg. NASA did not endorse Night Atlas.

Towns

Town and city positions are from the GeoNames geographical database, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The list keeps United States places of 500 people or more, and places of 15,000 or more in other countries.