Ono is a tiny city in northeastern Fukui, surrounded by mountains on all sides, which I read is a rare thing in Japan. It’s a very old castle town which claims to be famously known as “The Kyoto of Hokuriku,” just like Takefu did, and just about every other city in this region. Anyway, the city is holding a postcard contest with the theme “stars,” so I’ll be entering this piece.

Stars over Ono
I have to brag about my nerdiness a little bit on this one. I didn’t want to just slap an artificial starry night together for the background, but it’s also difficult to do a digital image outside in another city at night. In order to get a fairly accurate star image, I used a space-browsing program called Celestia, located Ono city on Earth, rotated the camera to the sky, coordinating with google maps and flickr images to find the proper viewing angle from the base of the main donjon of Ono castle, and then time-warped Celestia’s star navigation to August 31st, 2009, roughly 11:30 pm, when the Moon and the Milky Way would both be visible above the castle (as well as a couple of comets and an additional galaxy, which I didn’t paint). So while the stars are certainly brighter than you’d see on a night like this, and the spaces between them are not perfectly to scale, you’re looking at a fairly accurate version of the night sky above Echizen Ono Castle.