This minute
The sky
The cosmos over the coast, computed as you read
The sky over the Delmarva coast at this minute, as the cosmos it is, in three dimensions. Clouds of glowing gas you drift through, stars near and far, galaxies, and on the far sphere every star where it is right now, the Milky Way, the planets, the Sun, and the Moon lit the way she is. Drag it to look around.
The strip on the front page shows the planets along their road. This is the whole of it, seen from the only place anyone has ever seen it from, except that here the air and the ground have been taken away, so that what is over the coast at this minute is drawn the way it is rather than the way it looks: a cosmos, with depth. The clouds of gas nearest you slide against the stars behind them as you drift, which is what depth is. The hour is the real one. If the Sun is up, it is up, and you will find it where it is, with the stars still drawn around it, because the daylight that hides them is only the air, and the point of this page is where everything is. Drag to look around. Scroll to come closer. Slide the dial and the whole sky turns through the day the way it does.
How to read it
The coloured gas is nebula: clouds of hydrogen and dust lit by the stars inside them, drawn here the way long exposures draw them, in orange and rose and cyan and violet, with the dark lanes of dust that cross them. The ones you drift through are the near layer and are art. The far sphere is not: every star on it is a real star to the fifth magnitude, placed for this spot and this minute, the Sun among them when it is up, and the band of haze across it with its own clouds along it is the Milky Way, the disc of our galaxy seen from inside, with the great star clouds and nebulae drawn where they are, Sagittarius, the Lagoon, the rift through Cygnus, Orion, the Pleiades. Andromeda is where she is, a tilted spiral off the square of Pegasus. The brighter a star, the larger it blooms; the hotter, the bluer. The planets are named. The Moon is a lit world with her true phase, because she is simply lit by the Sun from where the Sun is, even when the Sun is under the ground. The faint ring with the directions on it is the horizon of the coast; the sphere goes on beneath it, since the Earth is the only thing in the way, and in daylight the air is the only other one.
Press Names and the chart comes up over the sky: the constellation lines, the names of the stars and the constellations, and the dashed gold road of the ecliptic with the twelve signs along it, set where the tropical zodiac puts them, which is the coordinate system your chart is drawn in.
What it is computed from
The same ephemeris the chart next door uses, run in your browser, places the Sun, the Moon and the planets for this minute and this spot on the Earth, and the clock is your own, so what you see is the sky as it stands while you read. The sixteen hundred stars are every star to the fifth magnitude in the HYG catalogue, by way of the d3-celestial star atlas, with the constellation lines and the names from the same source. The sky is drawn for the Delmarva coast unless you give it your own spot, in which case it is drawn for yours and the stars rearrange themselves accordingly.
The honest part
The near gas is not over Delmarva. The nearest nebula of any size is Orion's, thirteen hundred light years off, and to the eye it is a grey smudge; the colours in every picture of it are the camera's patience, not the eye's. What this page does is put the smudge back the way the long exposures see it, and put you inside a cloud like it so you can feel the depth that is really there between one star and the next. What you see outside has fewer stars than this, too. The fifth magnitude is the limit of a good eye under a dark sky, and a coast with towns on it does not offer one; on an ordinary night you will see the first three magnitudes and be glad of them.
Two shapes are in this picture before anything else is drawn. The far sphere is a sphere and the horizon is a circle, and neither of them is in the sky at all: they are what looking equally far in every direction makes. Why that keeps happening is on the shelf.