Equirectangular plot of declination vs right ascension of stars brighter than apparent magnitude 5 on the Hipparcos Catalogue, coded by spectral type and apparent magnitude, relative to the modern constellations and the ecliptic. Note that the right ascension axis increases from right to left to approximate the view of the night sky. HIP data is from http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/ftp/cats/I/239/hip_main.dat.gz . Messier object data is from http://messier.seds.org/dataDec.html . Constellation lines are derived from Stellarium's constellationship.fab and boundaries are from ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/pub/cats/VI/49/bound_18.dat with Ursa Minor's corrected to reach the north celestial pole. The Milky Way bitmap is from http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003572 (low-res magnitude 5 version). Thanks to Timwi for 4-colouring with each quadripoint having all colours.
Own work, http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003500/a003572
Cmglee, Timwi, NASA