One name.
Many possible skies.

How is this different from Real Sky?

Real Sky uses the frozen hyg41-sky-v1 alphabet: every A–Z letter has one permanent star and every name traverses the same field.

Found Sky removes that fixed A–Z star table. The name’s canonical geometry stays unchanged, but the browser searches predefined sky fields for a one-to-one assignment of the name’s unique letters. Repeated letters return to the same selected star.

A Found Sky result is therefore a name-specific geometric realization. It is not a recognized astronomical constellation and does not imply that a name has a privileged or natural location in the sky.

The browser searches locally.

The raw HYG catalog is not shipped to the site. An offline compiler reduces it to a bounded, versioned field index. The primary Layer-2 index contains 192 deterministic sky fields with at most 32 retained stars per field; a larger fallback is loaded only when needed.

When you choose “Find it in the sky,” a Web Worker performs the geometric search on your device. Your name is not submitted to HYG, an astronomy API, or another remote provider. The only additional network requests are same-origin static index files served by Name Constellation.

What counts as a good match?

The search first requires a candidate to clear the frozen STAR-05 geometry floor. Among acceptable candidates, the site can then favor different human-facing qualities:

Recommended prefers at least one proper-named star, then brighter stars and geometry. Closest match minimizes geometric residual. Named stars favors more proper names. Brightest favors the brightest faintest star. Grand view favors a larger angular span.

These ranking choices come from STAR-05C’s tradeoff audit. They are product policies, not evidence that visitors universally prefer one choice; a future user study would be needed for that claim.

Why the search is bounded.

STAR-05A found usable realizations for all 12 held-out names under the frozen experiment sweep, while random comparable geometries were also easy to realize. That supports a geometric-search interpretation rather than an unusual astronomical relationship.

STAR-05B then reduced the search budget. The medium profile—192 fields and 32 stars per field—preserved 100% coverage on the expanded real-name set and 100% on the long/complex real-name subset, while reaching 80% of the synthetic stress set. The larger fallback remains available for difficult cases.

Shared Layer-2 fields are pinned.

A Layer-2 share link stores the selected field index and selected catalog-star IDs together with the immutable open-sky index and ranking-policy IDs. That means a shared realization is not silently re-searched under a future algorithm and changed into a different set of stars.

The fragment payload is reversible encoding, not encryption. Anyone with the complete shared link can recover the name and selected field state. As with other Name Constellation links, the fragment is not part of the normal HTTP page request.

Data credits

Built from public astronomy.

HYG Database v4.1 / astronexus supplies the catalog identifiers, coordinates, magnitudes, designations, and proper-name fields used to compile the Layer-2 search indexes. The derived index retains the applicable HYG attribution and CC BY-SA 4.0 terms.

HYG source project · CC BY-SA 4.0

The raw 33.9 MB HYG CSV is an offline compiler input and is not included in the public browser bundle.

Try it.

Open a name, expand Find this name elsewhere in the real sky, and let the browser search the pinned field index.