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Real stars near the Sun

Your birthday star

Starlight takes years to reach us. Enter your birthday and we'll find the stars whose light, arriving tonight, set off around the day you were born.

Or try an age:

How your birthday star works

Light travels one light-year every year, so a star 30 light-years away is seen tonight by light that set off 30 years ago. Enter your birthday and this piece finds the real stars whose distance in light-years matches your age, to within six months either side, then flies you to them through a 3D map of 90,214 stars within 1,000 light-years of the Sun.

Your birthday star is the brightest match you could see with the naked eye whose distance is measured precisely enough to place it in your light-year. Under about 3.7 years old, no star is close enough yet: the nearest, Proxima Centauri, is 4.25 light-years away.

Where the stars come from

Within 130 light-years, 20,589 stars combine the AT-HYG catalogue (v3.2, David Nash) with the Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars (Smart et al. 2021), which adds faint red dwarfs and white dwarfs. Distances come from Gaia DR3 parallaxes and show their 1σ uncertainty; stars too bright for Gaia, such as Sirius and Vega, use Hipparcos. The Milky Way behind them is ESA's Gaia all-sky map.

This is astronomy, not astrology: no star is named or sold. A PICKURPAGE lab piece.