Catalogs
  • "SAO J2000" (SAO, 1996; UNSO, 1990) - Stars with visual magnitude V< 6.5
  • "Catalogue of the Brightest Stars" (Ochsenbein et al,1988) - Bayer/Flamsteed star names
  • "FK5-SAO-HD Common Name Cross Index" (Smith, 1996) - Star common names
  • "Messier" (Messier, 1782) - Messier deepsky objects
  • "NGC 2000" (Dryer, 1908, Sinnot, 1988) - Selected deepsky objects
  • "Catalogue of Constellation Boundary Data" (Delporte, 1930) - Constellation boundaries
  • "Selected Astronomical Catalogs" (Vol 4, ADC, NASA, 1997)
  • "Astronomical Data Center, NASA"
The databases built from these original catalogs were used by the PC software "Celestial Maps" to product the basic .bmp image map of the sky. The software has been developed by Ovidiu Vaduvescu (Canada), Lucian Curelaru (Romania, co-author of the map) and Mirel Birlan (France).

We used an enhanced beta version of Celestial Maps (to be released as version 9.0 by Winter 2001) to produce the .bmp image of the map. Finally, on this image we performed manually some editing work to improve about 100 details that humans do better than computers. This job was performed by all three authors.