Sky · 10,304,679 stars · HEALPix, equal area
The variable sky
Stars per equal-area cell, colored by typical period. Click a cell to list its stars in Search; scroll to zoom.Tap a cell for its counts, and again to list its stars in Search.
densest cells as a table
What the map shows
Cells are equal-area HEALPix pixels (order 7, 0.46°; order 8 when zoomed; order 6 on phones).
- Portrait: brightness is star count (stretched); color is the median adopted period of the surrounding order-6 cell, blue for hours to red for days. Uncolored where too few stars have a period. The glow is visual only.
- Stars: star count, log scale.
- Share periodic: fraction found periodic; empty below 20 stars.
- Median period: median adopted period of stars that have one.
- Survey: stars with a light curve from that survey.
Isolate highlights cells where the chosen class is the most common one; a class that is never the majority (e.g. RR Lyrae) shows little. Outlines are each survey's coverage in the cells on screen, and the share beside each survey is counted in the same cells: a cell is in when it holds one of the survey's light curves. Finer cells read lower, because a cell can be empty only because no catalogued star sits in it.
The great arcs come from Gaia's scanning pattern: about 8 million of the 10.3 million VSX records are Gaia DR3 imports.