A cartographer of moments

Who we are

The Star Moment is a product of Ciercle LLC, a software company registered in Sheridan, Wyoming, that designs and engineers digital products: web applications, mobile apps and the systems behind them. The Star Moment is the company’s consumer brand, and the one thing it makes for people rather than for other businesses: a map of the night sky from a moment that mattered, sold as print-ready files or as a framed print.

Because the company builds software for a living, the heart of The Star Moment is a piece of engineering rather than a template. The star engine that draws your map runs the same astronomy on the server and in your browser, so the preview you see while you design is exactly what is printed. It is also why the site has no accounts, no waiting and no manual steps: the files are rendered and emailed within minutes of payment.

Why we built it

A star map is one of the few gifts that can only exist for one moment and one place. The idea is old. The problem was that most of the companies selling star maps were print shops first, with a designer bolted on, decorative astronomy, and a digital file offered reluctantly or not at all. We wanted the opposite: a designer that feels good on a phone, a map computed properly from a real catalog and published openly, a free preview of your actual map before you spend anything, and a price that makes sense for a file.

So the digital map costs $25 and arrives in minutes. The framed print starts at $69 and ships free. Fourteen designs, three sizes, no subscription, no upsell maze. If you only ever download the free preview, that is fine too.

How your map is made

You enter a date, a time and a place. We resolve the exact coordinates and the time zone that applied there on that date, compute the position of around 9,000 stars and all 88 constellations for that instant, and draw them on the design you chose with your words beneath. For a digital order, the map is rendered at 300 DPI in three sizes and emailed to you. For a framed order, it is rendered at its exact print size and sent to our print partner, who prints it on semi-gloss paper, mounts it in a black wood frame with an acrylic front and ships it with tracking, free to the US and 40+ countries, usually within 7 to 12 business days.

The whole method, including what we deliberately leave out and where the maths stops being reliable, is on the accuracy page.