Mapping the Nightsky <3

So I really like sitting out in the Balcony late on Chilling Nights for Stargazing. Its really fun to notice how the stars are moving, keeping their relative positions same, It gives a Perspective on how fast Earth is spinning, its really really noticeable, like you can literally tell and point in the East that the land is moving in this direction by comparing where a constellation appears in the evening sky and where it moves to by the early morning. Also if a Star changes its Relative Position wrt other stars superfast,, within a span of a few hours then you can deduce and be more than certain that this celestial object is actually a lot more closer to us that all the other stars, and well, its actually not a star but a Planet. I think that is how Ancient astronomers could tell apart planets and stars. So Yea all this got me interested in making a Map of the Nightsky for my Amusement

So I got out with my little lamp, a geometrical divider thingy, a pencil and an A2 sheet

And marked the center with my Favourite Star Aldebaran, its like the brightest star in the Constellation of Taurus but I really like it coz it makes an Triangle / Arrow thingy in the sky that I think looks Beautiful, the way I see it, the Arrow points in the West, almost like the sky is moving in the direction of the arrow.

To Mark my next star I held up my Divider and flexed open my arm, closed an eye, held the divider orthogonally with one spike on Aldebaran and adjusting the other at the star in immediate vicinity of it.

okay so now with two stars marked, this is where it gets even more fun, so I dont need to worry about getting the directions and relative positions right because with those two marked, I can mark any other star just by making two arcs from the already marked star and mark their point of intersection. So basically to map any other star all you need are any two other stars.

with our Third star marked, we have three pairs to choose and mark the 4th star, well actually the markings by all three pairs should be concurrent but this is where things start falling apart, the points of interstion of 2 different pairs dont come out to be exactly concurrent but a bit off,,,,

This is coz of My Human Error lol, to get an accurate marking, the distance between my eyes and Divider should remain the same for all the readings i take, I try to keep my arm flexed and straight but when it comes to the stars higher up in the sky, raising my arm slightly decreases the distance bw my eyes and the divider which introduces an teeny tiny error.

But taking more and more readings compounds this error and I end up with A fuzz , down to the 15th star and it starts looking like a mess!

So I think I could work towards a simple model to like solve this problem and maybe make a primal mapping instrument, making it better and better with time, basic idea being getting the stand of my old moon looking telescope, getting a 30cm stick, fixing the divider at like 15 cm mark, fix it to the stand, aim it at the sky, adjusting the needles to match the stars. Lighting a Torch at the 30 cm mark and then projecting the shadow of the spikes onto a screen. A canvas for our beautiful artpiece. It would solve a couple of problems like getting rid of the error and aberrations+ if the divider cant span 2 distant stars, i can just move it a bit closer on the scale to where it can span them more comfortably and space the torch away to keep the scale constant and just about right, like 2 stars being far apart and ,thus cannot fit, wont be a problem anymore.

Making a custom nightsky Instrument for Mapping the sky would be a really cool summer project ;D

getting it custom made by a craftsman like a carpenter would be really tough since they good for making tables and cupboards and dont really pay attention to the intricacies of an instrument like this