what this is

a real star, your words, and what we don’t pretend.

what this is

Stars in the Skies lets you claim a real star. Real means real: every star here is a catalogued star from the Tycho-2 catalogue — a survey of about two and a half million stars, measured by the Hipparcos satellite — with real coordinates, a real brightness, and a real constellation it has sat in since long before anyone was here to look up. When you claim one, your name for it and your words are bound to that exact star in our registry, and it can never be claimed here again.

what we don’t pretend

No one sells official star names. Not us, not anyone. Astronomers name stars through the International Astronomical Union; the IAU doesn’t sell names, and nothing any company writes in a registry — including ours — changes what science calls a star. Some star-naming sites let you believe otherwise. We won’t: your star’s name lives in our registry, on its own page, in our sky — and that is what it is. We think the gift is better for being honest about it.

The same goes for ownership. You can’t buy a star, any more than you can buy a mountain on the Moon. What you’re buying from us is the keepsake: a real star bound to your words, with its own page, its own link, and — if you like — its own art.

too faint to see, real all the same

The stars we offer are the quiet ones: bright enough for the catalogues, too faint for the naked eye. That isn’t a flaw — it’s why they’re still unclaimed. Yours is really there: a telescope pointed at the coordinates on its page will find it, and the page tells you honestly where it sits over your town tonight. We would rather you know exactly what you have — a real tenth-magnitude star, precisely placed — than go out to a backyard looking for something we oversold.

claimed once

Within our registry, a star is claimed exactly once. We never resell it, reassign it, or quietly reset the list. Other star registries exist, and none of them talk to each other — that is the truth of this whole small business — so we keep ours carefully and say plainly that it is ours.

what it costs

A star is $3. Custom art adds $2. You can tip more when the moment deserves it — many people do — but the keepsake is complete at $3. It costs what it costs because honesty is cheap; it’s the pretending that gets expensive.

who we are

Stars in the Skies is an Experial project — the charge on your statement appears as Experial. The plain-language terms and privacy pages say the rest.

last updated July 2026