Does anyone know of any good, not too expensive, software for creating a fictional starmap?

For "regular" maps, while I still haven't found something that has all of the features that I want, let alone has all of my desired features and won't require me to stretch my budget, there are dozens of programs that are at least minimally suitable. For starmaps, however, pretty much all I've been able to find is software to explore or produce maps of the stars that actually exist in our sky, with no features useful for an author whose stories have a setting other than present-day Earth.

But some of my fellow worldbuilders might have had better success in their searches than I. Do any of you have any recommendations?

What do you think of the possibilities googling "starmap generator" reveals?

Personally, I've never used one. (Actually, I've never considering the night sky in my world building, though in retrospect is seems... obvious. Thanks for making me consider stars.) Creating constellations, the traditions surrounding them, and their rotational positioning in the sky would suffice for all story needs, surely?

Like I said, that gives me large numbers of sites about creating star charts (etc.) from various existing catalogs of stars in our sky.



Actually, that's an entirely different tack from what I want; for those purposes pencil and paper, or the simplest paint or vector-drawing program, would suffice. Instead of mapping the stars and constellations that terrestrial peoples would navigate by, I want to map the stars that spacefaring, interstellar, civilizations would navigate among.

http://www.nbos.com/products/astrosynthesis

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/s ... ftware.php

Seems like astrosynthesis is the most recommended everywhere, but of course you have to buy it.

This describes doing it yourself with graph software...

http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/ ... verse-maps

I've never used any of these.