starfield

Put the sky in a coordinate system.

Space data becomes useful when time, position, and reference frame agree. starfield brings those fundamentals together, with a Skyfield-inspired API and optional data sources you can select for your application.

Explore the Hipparcos catalog

Want the whole sky? Open the sky explorer to find named stars, follow the planets, and choose a field to solve.

A magnitude limit is a simple way to explore a star catalog. Lower values select brighter stars; raise the limit to reveal more of the sky.

A browser illustration of catalog filtering, using a bundled Hipparcos subset. Positions are catalog coordinates, not a prediction of tonight’s local sky. The Rust example below runs independently of this visualization. Data sources and encoding notes.

Bring the sky into Rust

cargo add starfield

The default crate includes core calculations and datastore support. Add only the data sources your application needs:

starfield = { version = "0.18.2", features = ["hipparcos"] }

Select the brightest stars

use starfield::catalogs::hipparcos::HipparcosCatalog;

fn main() {
    let catalog = HipparcosCatalog::create_synthetic();
    let bright = catalog.brighter_than(3.0);
    println!("{} stars brighter than magnitude 3", bright.len());
}

This example uses a synthetic catalog, so your first run does not depend on a large download. Move to a real catalog when you are ready to connect observations.

Catalogs, coordinates, and ephemerides

For small consumers, individual features such as hipparcos and horizons narrow the dependency set. See the full feature list →