Find Your Birth Star
Light has a cosmic speed limit. Take sunlight, for example. The light you are seeing now is 8 minutes old because the Sun is 150 million kilometers (or 8 light-minutes) away. So seeing things out there in the sky is always looking back in time.
All the stars we can see in the sky are many light-years away. Their light took a very long time to reach our eyes. Some of the light has been travelling for centuries. Some other stars released their light just a few years ago. Look at the night sky. Would you like to know which star emitted the light you are seeing at the time you were born?
You can find that out here! Just enter the year and month of your birth (or any other date) and get your star.
All the stars in this catalog are visible to the naked eye, so you can see them without the need of binoculars or telescopes. You can use the SkyLive planetarium to help you find them. But it also means that we are limiting ourselves to only the brightest star (so a smaller sample).
In general, it works for anyone between the ages of 4 and 80. Under 4, the closest is still the Sun. And when you get far enough beyond 80 light-years, the precision of our distant measurements becomes not accurate enough to do a month-by-month because it is so far away (if someone wants to pass along some Gaia data - which has an outstanding precision well beyond that distance, please do!).
For younger people, you might see that your stars stay the same for many months at a time (a few years for the very young ones), you can blame that on geometry. Since you get more stars as you go farther away (you have a bigger volume of the universe to look at), as you get older the star changes month by month — another silver lining of aging!
