Comment by mpetroff

I wrote a simple web-based night sky viewer a while ago [1], which renders the 750 brightest stars from coordinates in a data file (along with the moon). It uses D3.js to do fully client-side SVG-based rendering for interactive use, but it could be simplified to render server side to an SVG file. I think the main complication is that by adding stars, a projection needs to be decided on, and you'd need to consider the aspect ratio of the browser window.

[1] https://github.com/mpetroff/nightsky