Find Your Birthday Star
Enter an age below to discover a star whose light began its journey when that person was born, traveling across the cosmos to reach Earth today.
Scanning stellar database...
Star Identification
Observation Data
Project Background
This project is inspired by the exhibit "A Spectrum of a Star" from the Museum of Broken Relationships in Los Angeles.
The description reads: "We are both astronomers. On my 26th birthday he sent me a spectrum of a star in the Orion constellation as my birthday gift. This star, named pi3, is 26 light years away from the Earth. He said: look, at the time when you were born, the light left this star, passing through the endless interstellar space, the countess dust and nebula, arriving here after a 26 light-year r journey. So have you. Here you meet your starlight and I meet you. I could only hear the sound of my heart beating then. Though we have already broken up, every time I see the Orion constellation, I relive some sweet memories."
Museum of Broken Relationships, Los Angeles
Technical Implementation
Finding research-grade stellar spectrum data is technically complex, as these are typically stored as data files in specialized archives. This project uses photographic observations from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), providing beautiful visual representations of these distant stellar objects.