Star Map – Nearest Stars of the Solar System

Some time ago, I tried to find a star map of the closest stellar systems to us. The Sun is our star, and many people know that Alpha (or Proxima) Centauri is the closest star to us after our own Sun, but what else is there? I couldn’t find a version I liked, so I decided to draw one myself.

It took a few years to finish this project (which happened in 2023), but in the end I'm really happy with the outcome. I drew everything by hand, so it’s not scientifically accurate, but it does give the overall picture about our neighbourhood. The striking number of red dwarves gives perspective to the stars we don’t see – the M-class stars are too faint to be visible with our naked eye, and they make ca. 75% of all the stars in the universe. And all the brown dwarves around us we haven’t even found yet.

The map shows the nearest stars in 30 light-year radius. The bigger the star is, the closer it is.

Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, SIMBAD Astronomical Database, SkySafari planetarium programme and maps of the both hemispheres

First I downloaded star maps for both hemispheres, North and South, by Roberto Mura from Wikipedia. I placed these maps in Adobe Illustrator and drew the IAU constellation lines over them to get the base for my map.

Next I added coordinates and names for the constellations as well as drew edges for the maps.

Then came the fun part. I checked the lists of the nearest stars and brown dwarves in 30 light-year radius from Wikipedia (and cross-checked it from some other available sources) and fetched the coordinates for them from SIMBAD Astronomical database. I also cross-checked the positions related to the IAU lines from planetarium programmes like Sky Safari for the objects available. (Brown dwarves don't really turn up in many programmes.) One by one I placed the stars on the map, marking also their spectral classes and if they were multiple star systems or not. Also white dwarfs (dead stars) got their markings. (This whole step took awhile.)

The idea of the map was to depict the stars not according to their brightness but their distance. So the stars closest to us (distance under 10 l.y.) are the biggest, the stars a bit farther (10-20 l.y.) are medium size and the stars between 20-30 l.y. are the smallest. So the map truly only shows the closest stars, all under 30 l.y. away.

The map is not quite exact, as about 75% of the stars in the universe are red dwarfs and we've just started to chart brown dwarves (which are "failed stars" and never started fusion reactions, but glow in infrared anyway) in the past years. Their distance is difficult to calculate, even with parallax measurements, so there were many disagreements with the distances in different sources. I did try to make the best of it, but likely the information in the map is bound to change when we get more data.

Lastly, I added the Milky Way (to give reference and some depth), the heading and the explanation for the map symbols. For the spectral classes I only needed to include the classes from A down, since there are no O or B type stars in 30 l.y. radius. (Which is a good thing, considering supernova explosions.) What actually surprised me was the number of the stars with spectral class lower to our Sun (K and M stars as well as brown dwarves). Our Sun is a dwarf star (according to science there are only giants and dwarves and Sun is not a giant), but it's still rather bright in this neighbourhood.

It was also a revelation to realise how few naked eye stars there are in this map – and many are not very famous, like Sigma Draconis or Eta Cassiopeiae. (Then again, Epsilon Eridani or Tau Ceti are popular through science fiction.)

If you ever start doing anything this challenging in Adobe Illustrator, use the layers from the start on. (Then again, if you do, you probably know this already.) The more layers, the more freedom to make different versions from the map when needed. And lock the layers when not in use. (Otherwise the risk of moving them accidentally and without noticing is rather big.) It helped me a lot storing the things in different layers, I could cross-check the data without forgetting any stars.

I'm a keen amateur astronomer (never studied astrophysics, though), so naturally I printed the map for myself. I did the printable version in Adobe InDesign to get it how I wanted, with the correct size and bleed for printing. It's on my wall and I like to return to it every now and then to wonder about the "invisible neighbourhood" of our Solar System. (And also remind myself about how many stars are actually double or multiple stellar systems, when ours is just a single star system.)

I did the map in Finnish (my native language, that's the language of the map in this picture) and English. The map is CC4.0-BY-NC-ND, and I encourage anyone interested to download and print it to do so. (The size European poster size 70cm x 50cm. There is 3mm bleed in the pdf-file for the printing. The printing data is European standard CoatedFOGRA39.)

I hope there are some people who find this (somewhat technical) star map interesting! :) Download the full map from below.