Astrophotography visibility plotting and planning tool (opens in new tab)

(airmass.org)

58 pointsNKosmatos2mo ago9 comments

9 comments

If you are more into doing this locally than using a Webservice, have a look at astroplan based on astropy.

https://astroplan.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Once you’ve confirmed when your target is visible, this site provides a handy forecast of atmospheric viewing conditions.

https://www.cleardarksky.com/csk/

salezred2mo ago

If you're the author or if anyone knows a program that can do this, it would be great to have a way to take a photoshphere or a 360 degree pano and see what is actually viewable from a particular location.

I've done this in stellarium to some degree but i am still not very happy with it because I still can't quite get an accurate estimate without a tremendous amount of manual work, so someone actually actively working on this would be amazing.

blackhaz2mo ago

Very nice tool. If you don't mind, I've linked to it from our observatory: https://www.alnitakobs.com/telescope/

A widget version would be nice!

bhouston2mo ago

This reminds me of this submission to Hacker News recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330012

lanthade2mo ago

Interesting tool, would probably be super useful if I had more knowledge of the things floating around out there. I'm usually just concerned with photographing the galactic core on dark nights. I didn't have enough domain knowledge to figure that out with this tool though. I use PhotoPils on my iOS devices for astrophotography planning and that works great for my limited level of knowledge.

dylan6042mo ago

Don’t let lack of familiarity keep you from exploring. More and more tools/apps are available like TFA that lets you find things without knowing about them before hand. There’s no better way to learn than diving into the new to you object you just images all night. Don’t let some one tell you that you have to know an object intimately before imaging. How you progress through your journey in astronomy is up to you. Keep looking up!

salezred2mo ago

The funny thing is that I personally have ended up creating a "large" google sheet with all the Messier objects which my rig could image, and added a column for "when" to image (i.e., spring, etc). It's served me quite well.

As I said in another comment, a true killer feature would be to image my yard, with all the obstacles blocking the sky, and intersecting the available sky space with the trajectories of those objects, and use that info to actually tell me what I can image.

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