The sky at a wedding

The day is not a moment

A birth has a recorded time. A wedding has a schedule. There is the moment the ceremony began, the moment the vows were said, the moment the doors opened, the first dance, and the drive home with the windows down — and the sky was different for each of them, because the whole thing turns about fifteen degrees an hour.

The tool starts you at four in the afternoon, which is roughly when ceremonies end. That is an assumption and nothing more. Change it to the minute you actually mean, and be specific: a chart made for the vows is a different picture from one made for the last song.

Most weddings happen in daylight

Here is the thing nobody selling these mentions. If the ceremony was at two in the afternoon in June, the Sun was high, and the stars on the chart — every one of them in the right place, at the right brightness — were completely invisible. Nobody at that wedding saw a single one.

This tool tells you so, in red, above the plate. It is not an error and it is not a reason to change the time. The stars were genuinely there in those positions; being unable to see something does not move it. But a chart of an invisible sky should say that it is one, and if you would rather have a sky somebody could have looked up at, the evening of the same day is a few hours away.

Two people arrive with two skies

Each of you already has a birth sky, and they are almost certainly different — different dates, probably different towns, possibly different hemispheres, in which case they are not merely different but turned over relative to each other.

The wedding sky is the first one that belongs to both. That is a plainer thing to say than most of what gets written on these prints, and it happens to be true, which the rest of it usually is not.

What to write on it

Two lines fit: a heading and something underneath. The restraint is worth keeping. Two names and a date will still read well in thirty years; a line of verse chosen in a hurry generally will not.

The date, the place and the coordinates are printed underneath automatically, so the words at the top do not need to carry any of that. They only need to say whose night it was.

Having it printed

The file is free, at full print resolution, and there is nothing to pay at any point. If it is going on a wall as a gift, the practical questions — which size, matte or gloss, and the one instruction that stops a print shop cropping the margin off — are set out separately.