It started about 5 years ago. Working as I do as an R&D engineer at the division that builds large format printers at HP, I thought it'd be nice to take advantage of the huge and good printers around me to print a really good star chart. Good as in thousands of stars, with colors, in their right position, as seen from a given vantage point at a given time. And big, really big.

It is the curse of the engineer: if it can be done, it will be done. I learnt how to compute the position of stars and planets, I found out about the HYG database, I learnt enough PostScript to get by, and I put together a Common Lisp program that produced a nice ps file with thousands of stars and all the planets, with constellations and grids (it helped when they demoted Pluto from its planet status, as it was the hardest to compute for). I made the program so that it would draw pictures of the planets instead of their symbols, a feature loved by my non-astronomer friends.

It was an interesting project, and successful in a way: I made several charts as birthday presents, and gave a specially big one to the Fabra observatory here in Barcelona, where it went on display. But when I tried to run it in the server where my web sites are hosted it brought it down. I guess it should have been possible to optimize the program, but I never did it. So I left it somewhere in my hard disk, and forgot about it.