About

Hello 👋 I'm Steve Berardi — a software engineer and amateur astronomer who loves creating maps of the sky. I create all my maps with Starplot, an open-source Python library that I built which is now used by astronomers and astrophysicists around the world. I'm also building Sky Atlas, an app that helps you explore the night sky and plan your observations.

I’ve been fascinated by sky maps ever since buying my first telescope eyepiece from Explore Scientific and seeing those beautiful maps by Wil Tirion on the box. Then I started collecting sky atlases, which eventually inspired me to try and create them.

Like many amateur astronomers, I also purchased the book Turn Left at Orion when I started looking up at the night sky. And that book really made me appreciate learning how to navigate the sky by using star charts and maps.

Projects I'm Working On

	Starplot Starplot is a free and open source (MIT licensed) Python library for creating star charts and maps. It supports many map projections and has a styling framework that lets you customize the design of your plots. It's used by astrophysicists and amateur astronomers around the world.
	Sky Atlas Sky Atlas is an interactive map of the night sky — showing millions of stars, thousands of deep sky objects (DSOs), and more! It's an app for amateur astronomers to help them plan their observations and explore the night sky.
	Big Sky Catalog The Big Sky Catalog is a compilation of various Star and Deep Sky Object (DSO) catalogs, tailored for the purpose of visual observation of our beautiful night sky. Currently, it contains over 2 million stars compiled from the Hipparcos, Tycho-1, and Tycho-2 catalogs.