- Home
- About
About AstroNight
AstroNight is a small independent project from Finland, made by a photographer who wanted a patient and honest companion for nights spent outside under the stars.
Why it exists
Anyone who photographs the night sky learns quickly that the hardest part is rarely the camera. It is knowing, on a cold evening with a limited number of clear hours, what to point it at and what the settings should be, and then, days later, understanding why the result looks the way it does. Good answers to those questions are scattered across books, forums and tables, and they usually assume that you already know the vocabulary.
AstroNight was started to put those answers in one place and to phrase them kindly. It is designed to be used in the dark, with a red interface option for your eyes, and it is designed to be honest, which means that it tells you when it does not know something instead of inventing a confident reply.
The northern latitudes shape it too. Finland has summer nights that never become dark, winters with long hours of real darkness and an aurora season that rewards people who are ready, and the app has to handle all three properly.
How it is made
The app is written natively for the iPhone. The astronomy that can be calculated, such as the position of the sun and moon and the hours of darkness, is calculated on the phone, and only a few things such as the weather, the aurora forecast and comet data are fetched from public services when you have a connection. The section about privacy explains exactly what is sent and to whom.
This website follows the same spirit. It has no cookies, no advertising, no analytics and no scripts from other companies. The red light switch at the top of every page turns the whole page red so that it can be read outdoors without spoiling your night vision, and it remembers your choice only on your own device. The slowly drifting stars on the home page stand still for anyone whose device is set to reduce motion.
Credits
Sky darkness estimates in the app use the World Cities Database from simplemaps.com, which is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Aurora data comes from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, comet data from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory services, forecasts from Open Meteo, and target pictures from Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia under their own licences.
The typefaces on this website are Bricolage Grotesque and Newsreader, both released under the SIL Open Font License, and they are served from this website itself. The pictures are our own renderings.