Planning astroimaging sessions is important to make the most of your time under the stars. Charles Bracken’s The Astrophotography Planner is a useful tool, available as a paperback book or, reviewed here, a custom PDF bespoke for your location.
Which target to image next? It’s a question that astrophotographers often have to tackle, working out the optimal deep sky object to collect photons from, potentially over many weeks in order to gain long integration times. There are various tools to help, such as the website Telescopius, but if you want a more traditional approach then it’s worth considering The Astrophotography Planner.
Available as a paperback from Amazon priced at £18.99, for just $19.99 (£16.61 at time of writing) you can order a Custom Digital Edition direct from the author. This PDF document contains bespoke charts for your specific observing location, plus added extras such as Moon data. In order to receive the Custom Digital Edition you need to follow a few simple instructions to give the author the necessary information. The advised turnaround time is given as one to four days, but mine arrived in my email inbox exactly four hours after making payment. Impressive!
The Planner itself is 166 pages of useful information and charts, covering 87 key areas of the sky visible to imagers in the northern hemisphere. If you’re in the southern hemisphere then unfortunately this isn’t the book for you. Content is designed for astrophotographers rather than visual observers, as the title suggests. I found the overview page to be particularly well-designed, allowing you to see at a glance which targets are in the best locations, i.e. have the most hours of darkness, at any given time of the year.
Each target has its own dedicated two-page section, with charts showing how many hours of quality imaging time you could expect on any given date; the rise, set, and transit time; and a map of the object’s location. It doesn’t take into account your own skyline though, so that big tree or neighbour’s house still need to be factored in. I find that making a custom landscape in Stellarium (instructions here) helps. Note that I personally image regardless of what the Moon’s doing (see Controversial Opinion #6), but I’m in the minority!
The author has also included brief notes for each target to help astrophotographers. These are insightful and well worth reading. For example, The Dark Shark includes the advice “Starless processing is the best way to stretch the nebulosity enough without blowing out the stars. The contrast of blue reflection nebula and blue and orange stars with the drab shark can be very pretty if you can keep the chrominance noise down.” The Cave Nebula has the tip “For narrowband imaging, the SII and OIII signals are particularly weak, so allocate at least double the integration time to them vs. H-alpha.” I wish these sections were expanded as they can really help steer an astroimager in the right direction.
As good as The Astrophotography Planner is, there’s a distinct lack of actual astrophotos. In fact, the wonderful front cover is literally it as far as astroimages go. The rest of the Planner is text and diagrams, and while these are understandably the focus, I’d have liked to see some example images for each target, perhaps using different equipment.
As it stands, The Astrophotography Planner Custom Digital Edition is a very useful starting point to choose your next imaging project. I certainly recommend it, but it’s best used in conjunction with research online. Note that data is given for the current year, plus the next two years. This makes a purchase in January the best option! If you’re interested then click here for info on how to place an order.
As an aside, the author’s website is well worth a peruse. In particular, his instructions on how to build a DIY pier (a.k.a. Todmorden pier) are the best I’ve come across.
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