Star chart

Been working on this 18"x24" poster as a gift to my wife, the idea is simple, the star chart of the moment when she was born.

Some detail:

I have nearly no knowledge about star chart or constellations and such, I was using a star chart generator online to generate images in different magnitudes as reference.

It took me a month (something like 4-6 hours a week), mainly because my OCD was kicking in. I tried to align every stars in a 320x320 grid, even all those 11,300 dots inside the milky way. Tried to have 102,400 objects in illustrator as the base of the grid, turns out it's really slow to pan and zoom around. Ends up having 320 lines with 320 anchor points on each line, and using a script to align every star exact center to the anchor point (should have been doing it by hand since it's a print, no one can tell the different if it's 0.001 pixel off in the printout, but I really want it to be pixel prefect).

There's no way to fill a pattern in an irregular shape without the pattern object being clipped in AI drives me crazy, I used a stupid approach: expanded every objects and deleted those I don't needed. Then I realize there's a easier way to do it.

Second thing that drives me crazy is, there's is no standard for how constellation lines connected, yes there's IAU but those lines are fairly boring. Also, even the names of the stars have no standard, two different stars under the same constellation can have same name! Struggled a while before settling on which lines should I connect and which names should I pick.