Night sky color - choose your favorite

What is the color of the night sky? Black? Although the celestial vault looks black to us, and if often represented in black on star charts, including (so far) on our own GreaterSkies custom star maps , it actually has color. Wouldn’t it be cool to choose your night sky color when creating a personalised sky map? We thought so. Our team worked hard at it, and we are very excited to announce that sky map colors are here.

How cool is that new teal color? Perfect gift for your ash grey cat, it goes so well with the hair! Seriously, this map would find its place in many modern interiors, even those without grey cats.

Choose your night sky color

Before you personalise your star map with your place, date and time, you will have for each design a choice of colors, in addition to the choice of print and frame dimensions .

Our colors of the night sky (or the day sky)

Both the Classic and Night Sky star maps will come in 4 colors besides our usual deep black.

Our designer has chosen the colors so the nearly 8,000 stars and constellations show at their best, and the star map poster design fit in a variety of home decors. The available colors are:

• Ultramarine
• Artic blue
• Mulberry
• Chocolate

This is a detail of the Classic star map print in Ultramarine, the color we most often associate with the sky at night.

The Artic Blue takes some liberty with the true color of the night sky, in fact it is closer to some day skies hues, which is totally fine since you can customise your star map for any time of day, of course! Plus, this color looks very nice in a nursery, for example. Or if you have a grey cat.

This Mulberry color reminds us of a colourful sky at sunset. Doesn’t the Sun look stunning on this image?

Last the Chocolate color is a tribute to the old star charts that guided sailors over the past centuries.

Are the colors of the printed posters identical to those seen on screen?

Color rendering on screen and on prints depends on the calibration of each screen and printer.

We make every effort to ensure that the star map colors shown on images we publish on the GreaterSkies website are extremely close to the color of the star maps we print and ship. However, depending on the calibration of your own screen, you might see somewhat different hues and therefore perceive a difference between what you see on screen and the print you will receive. For exemple, if you like very high or low brillance on your screen, you might want to look at our website on different devices.

If you purchase a printable sky map, when you download your files, they will appear brighter than the photos on the website. This is normal, as the prints normally come out darker than the files. However, the exact printed colors will depend on the printer used, due to differences in printer color calibration.

We deliver high resolution files, but cannot guarantee the print quality or colors in that case. But the digital file being in your possession, it can be edited to get the color closer to what you want on a specific printer with an image editing software.

If color tone is very important to you, you might want to ask the print shop for a small proof before printing a large size poster. The proof has to be printed with the same printer to be valid though, printing on your home printer for example will likely give different results.

What is the true color of the night sky?

In creating our new star maps, our designer clearly took some liberties and chose colours that would look nice in most home decors. But what is the true color of the night sky? Black?

This is the colour that come to mind, yet the night sly is rarely black, or blue. When the night is dark, our human eyes perceive the sky as black, because the light present is not sufficient to stimulate the color-sensitive cones in our eyes. However, there is light in the night sky, and many colors. When there is moonlight, and no interference from other light sources like city lights, the night sky appears blue, like it does in day time, due to the Raleigh effect.

As for the colour of the universe, it is not black either but a rather surprising color, of which we’ll talk in another post.