Have you ever gone out on a clear night, fired up Stellarium, scrolled through endless objects… and still ended up shooting Andromeda for the seventh time?
That was me, over and over. I love M31, but at some point I realised I wasn’t really exploring the sky anymore – I was just defaulting to the same “safe” ten targets. So I ended up building my own astrophotography target planner. The process of finding something new that was visible, well placed, matched my focal length, and wasn’t completely impossible from my Bortle 5 backyard was just too much friction.
So I built a tool to fix that:
How my planner app looks on a desktop
My Astrophotography Target Planner helped me discover objects like NGC 7822 and the Question Mark Nebula – targets I genuinely didn’t know existed a few months ago. In this article, I’ll break down the main ideas from the video so you can see how it works and whether it might actually help you plan your own sessions.
Watch the full walkthrough of my Astrophotography Target Planner here:
What You’ll Learn in This Video
In the video, I walk through how I’ve gone from “winging it” every clear night to planning genuinely new targets in minutes.
You’ll see:
How I used to plan targets manually with Stellarium (and why I kept ending up on the same objects).
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