Type your name into Constellation Mapper and something happens that feels slightly uncanny. Stars appear, lines connect them, and a name floats up beneath the pattern — The Wandering Gate, or The Hidden Arc. It looks like something that was always there, waiting to be found.
That feeling is the whole point. The tool is built around a single, quiet idea: every word has a constellation. Not randomly assigned — deterministically generated. The same word will always produce the same stars, the same lines, the same name. Type "ocean" today and again in three years — you'll get the same constellation both times. It doesn't change. It was never going to change.
The same word always makes the same stars. It feels permanent. That's not an accident.
The stars are driven by the characters in your word. Each letter contributes to the angle and distance of a point in the pattern — so words with similar letters produce subtly similar constellations, while very different words diverge dramatically. Long words spread their stars wide. Short ones cluster them close, almost intimate.
After the stars are placed, they're connected using a nearest-neighbour algorithm — the same method astronomers use to trace the invisible lines between real stars. Then one or two cross-edges are added, drawn from a seeded random source, so the constellation has the slightly imperfect, branching quality of the ones humans have named for centuries.
The poetic name — The Lost Gate, The Ancient Veil — is generated from the same seed. Two words from fixed lists, combined in a way that sounds like something an old navigator might have written in a margin. It always feels like a discovery rather than an invention.
People use it for names. Mostly names. Their own, their partner's, their children's, their pets'. There's something about seeing a name rendered as something cosmic that makes it feel more real, more permanent. Some people screenshot it. Some people share it. A few have told us they'd get it tattooed. We believe them.
You can also save your constellation as a PNG — the full dark canvas, your stars, your lines, your name. It's a file that belongs to your word now.
There are no bad constellations. Some are dense and intricate; others are spare and angular. All of them feel inevitable, as if they were written before you typed anything.