Unhurried articles about planning a night, choosing a target and learning from the photographs that you take, written for people who would like to understand the sky a little better.
AstroNight is now on the App Store. Free for iPhone and iPad, iOS 17 or later. Read the launch story.
Get it on the App Store
AstroNight is now on the App Store: a free iPhone and iPad app that tells you what is worth shooting tonight, which settings to start with, and whether your frames are any good while there is still time to fix them.
These apps answer different questions, which is why the honest answer to "which one should I get?" is usually "which job do you need done?"
A single glance at a white screen can undo half an hour of dark adaptation, and a red light is the simple trick that protects it.
A meteor shower is the earth driving through the crumbs left behind by a comet, and with a little planning you can catch some of them on camera.
The most surprising thing about deep sky photography is that the secret is not a better exposure but a bigger number of them.
A narrowband filter lets through only a thin slice of colour, which is exactly why it can make a nebula shine under a moonlit or town sky.
A comet is a dirty snowball with a hair-thin atmosphere, and the two tails it grows tell you what the sun is doing to it.
A single exposure of two hours would ruin your battery and fill your picture with noise, while a hundred short ones create a cleaner and safer image of the turning sky.
Andromeda is the most distant thing that you can see with your own eyes, and it is also one of the most forgiving galaxies to photograph.
In a Finnish summer the sun never goes far enough below the horizon to give you a truly dark sky, and it helps to know exactly what you are getting instead.
The most photographed part of our galaxy never climbs out of the horizon haze for anyone as far north as Helsinki, and the reason is a matter of simple geometry.
The aurora cannot be summoned, but it can be anticipated, and a little understanding of the forecast turns a night of hopeful waiting into a night with a plan.
A bright moon does not ruin a clear night so much as change what the night is good for, and knowing which targets to choose makes all the difference.
The Bortle scale is a useful ruler for the darkness of a site, provided you remember what kind of ruler it is and how coarse its markings are.
A camera that allows manual settings, a lens with a wide aperture and a steady tripod are all you need to begin, and a little preparation does the rest.
The small screen on the back of a camera forgives almost everything, so it helps to ask a few specific questions of a test frame while you are still under the sky.
Try a shorter word, or .
