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New full colour designs of planisphere star charts


A new step

Our first full colour planisphere was the 11th edition (2014) of our oldest Planisphere, the square shaped Dutch PLN-NL. It illustrates the changes in the world of printing, as printing in full colour is now not so much more expensive as printing in two colours. But in several steps (in 2017, 2019 and again in 2020) our main full colour design was improved more. See the pictures at the bottom.
The last improvement is for the main ('mother') design for the North hemisphere, and already several of the northern models. All models are derived from the two mother designs, so it was important to make that one up to date (the southern hemisphere will follow soon). That's the only way to maintain the similarity between all designs. See below for more information about that! First a little history of our FC designs.

New star chart designs

The Super Planisphere, which came out in June 2016, has some new features, like a more intensive use of colour and an extended list of interesting deep-sky objects (with clear differences between the different types of diffuse nebulae). They also show the Winter Hexagon and the Great Square, besides the Summer Triangle and Orion's Belt which had also been part of the design.

I wanted the new star chart of the PLN-NL the same way. I also wanted a fuzzier Milky Way (as advised by my friend Wil Tirion), but didn’t give certain spectral classes of stars (the ‘red, orange and blue stars’) a colour, as these colours might not be visible on this scale, and also because there is no space to explain these colours. This edition came out in 2017, and (again but slightly) improved in the 2019 edition.

Other designs may follow this development and the first is out already: our latest French edition! See below.


More objects in PLN-NL

Like the Super Planisphere the new designs contain sixteen ‘new’ objects, many suggested by a group of observers that advised me. Some of the objects were added because they attracted my attention when making my Star Model (sorry, no English version, yet): VY Canis Majoris, V Hydrae, Eta Carinae and R Leporis. Others are the open cluster Cr 399 (‘Brocchi’s Cluster’); the globular clusters M72 , NGC 6322 and Melotte 111 (the Coma Star Cluster); the planetary nebulae M76 and M97; the galaxies M102, M108 and M109; the starforming region NGC 896 (Heart and Soul Nebula); and four ‘special objects’, indicated with a star like symbol: M40 (a double star), M73 (an ‘asterism’ of four stars*), the variable star Y Canum Venaticorum and the star 51 Pegasi, the first Sun-like star around which an exoplanet was discovered. The stars in that last little row don’t have their normal symbols (like for variable, or double stars) because they are too weak to see in binoculars.
Of a few constellations I changed the connecting lines to bring my designs more into line with what other star charts and atlases show.

*) an asterism is a group of stars that can be seen close to each other in the sky but are not connected.


Better readability

Getting older myself I now sometimes encounter the problem that I cannot read some of the smaller codes in my designs... By using a bolder version of my favourite VAG-font readability was greatly improved.

The 2019 and 2020 designs

As I said in the intro, 2019 was a special year, with even more important improvements, and in the basis: the first of the two 'mother' designs, the 'North - Main' - and the most important at that. As I had just done the PLN-NL design in FC, I needed to make the 'Main North' in the same style of FC design, which was a lot of work as many changes were necessary. And you don't to introduce new errors while improving the design. Based on that main design I could make the new Catalan planisferi, a new Dutch one for 52°N and the new standard French planisphère (PLN-47F), that you can read about here.
Below are pictures of the new designs, and the new symbols.

In 2020 the new PLN-50NL (Dutch) and PLN-S20 (English model for 20°S) came out. The plan is to have all standard models in full colour as soon as possible. First (in late 2020 or early 2021) will be the PLN-50, the English planisphere for 50°N, of which here is a picture:















































Left: the list of symbols of the new FC designs. Your planisphere could be in these colours and with the symbols like this! Another recent addition are detailed 'maps' of Orion's Belt, the immediate area around Polaris and the Pleiades - with the names of the stars involved.