Heavens - Majesty of the Night Sky

2023-2024 Winner of the British Cartographic Society’s Stanfords Award for Printed Mapping

This National Geographic map shows projections of the northern sky and the southern sky.

Humans have long marvelled at the beauty of the billions of stars above, observing their regular traverse across the sky and seeking to understand their origins and order. Here, a mosaic of thousands of images reveals our celestial sphere in its entirety, and with it, a diversity of multicultural names and imagined patterns amassed over centuries of scholarship and awe.

Stellar nurseries, merging galaxies, remnants of exploded stars, and giant clouds of energized dust are just some of the objects on display when we peer into deep space. We gain a greater understanding of their composition, history, and movement as technology advances and we see farther into the cosmos.

Insets show infrared views of the northern and southern skies. Celestial bodies emit varying wavelengths of light, from those visible to the human eye to infrared and x-ray waves. Telescopes equipped with spectrometers detect and measure light emissions to help determine an object's composition, density, and temperature.

Countless cultures over time have ascribed characters and stories to the predictable patterns of stars that appear seasonally in the night sky. In 1928, the International Astronomical Union, the organization that applies standards to the cataloging of space, assigned boundaries to 88 regions of the sky.

Also includes brief explanations of stellar names, star magnitudes, celestial coordinates and cosmic codes.

Please note: due to the depth of dark colour on this map, ink may transfer so handle with care.