	Sky map generalities
	The purpose here is to develop basic features of sky map drawing.

Generalities

Some existing softwares already provide good quality star maps.
For Windows, I tested

Cartes du ciel, freeware; at http://www.stargazing.net/astropc/download.html

SkyMapPro, commercial, but demo version at http://www.skymap.com

For more links, it's worth having a look at http://astrosurf.com/astropc/liens.html

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The usefullness to develop sky map representation is then limited ; it can be interesting for portability, and to add some features.
The only feature I'm planning to develop is a user interface which permits to define the lines of constellations or asterisms. This can be interesting for children (maybe adults too).
But I'm not planning to code more than basic sky map features.

My motivation here is for planetary phenomena. For example, if I want to predict and visualize star occultations, star catalogs must be computed, like in sky map. An other use is for curve plotting, to plot curves with the stars in their real positions as background.

Developping a good quality sky map software demands a lot of work :
Astronomy

getting data from various star catalogs, cross reference them, bring the infos to the user ;

include all the corrections to the position, track the precision

User interface, which is a big job, specially to give configuration possibilities to the user.

Information sources

See the help of SkyMapPro (in Appendices and references).

Most of the interesting catalogs are on the Nasa's CDs.

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