The constellations as visualized by H. A. Rey in his book The Stars: A New way to See Them , Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, 1952, are much better representations of the modern constellations than the IAU visualizations.

A script and a compiled constellation data file are available in a zip archive for download. These files allow the constellation shapes as drawn by Rey to be displayed on Cartes du Ciel charts.

The ReyConstL.txt script file is used with the ConvConstL.exe program to create the constellation file for use with Cartes du Ciel. If you wish to makes changes to the constellation file, edit this script and recompile with the ConvConstL.exe program.

The constl.dat file is a compiled version of the ReyConstL.txt file. To use this file, replace the existing constl.dat file in the \cat\bsc5 folder of the Cartes du Ciel installation folder with the constl.dat file from the zip archive.

Notes:

1. In some instances it was not entirely clear as to which star should be used to accurately portray what Rey was visualizing. In these cases and other cases where multiple bright stars were close together, I always selected the brightest star.
2. Rey combines the constellations of Ophiuchus, Serpens Caput and Serpens Cauda into one group called the Serpent Holder.
3. Rey combines the constellations of Carina, Puppis, Vela and Pyxis into one large group called The Ship (Argo).
4. The constellation Caelum does not appear on Charts 1-17 in the book but does appear on the Universal Sky Chart on the cover, therefore I added it to the file.
5. Rey considered the constellations Antlia, Horologium, Mensa, Microscopium, Sculptor and Sextans to be much to faint or uninteresting and draws each of them as a single star. These constellations do not appear in the file.

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