About
An astrophotography gallery where every frame is anchored to the real sky: not a picture with a caption, but a window onto precise coordinates.
In numbers
- 22 published photographs
- 116.2 hours of light collected across 16 photographs with exposure data
- 25 nights of shooting from 8/2021 to 11/2024
- 97.3 square degrees photographed in 38 frames, out of the 41,253 of the whole sky
What this is
Every image here was captured, processed and then SOLVED: an astrometric procedure recognises the stars in the frame and establishes, pixel by pixel, which point of the sky they correspond to. From that moment the photograph stops being an image and becomes a map.
What you can do with it
- Move the pointer over a photo and you read the right ascension and declination of the point you are looking at.
- You can switch on the equatorial grid, the stars, the constellation lines and the deep sky objects: they are drawn at their coordinates, not placed by eye.
- The sky map shows where each frame falls, with the real photographs laid on the starry background: it makes plain how small a field of view really is.
With thanks to
This site stands on other people's work, and it is worth naming it.
- Astrometry.net — solves the images: that is where the coordinates of every pixel come from.
- Aladin Lite · CDS — at the Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg: the background sky tiles of the map (Mellinger, DSS2, 2MASS) and the Gaia DR3 catalogue the stars come from.
- d3-celestial — the star, constellation and deep sky catalogues derive from the open data published with d3-celestial.
- OpenSeadragon — makes it possible to pan and zoom images of tens of megapixels without downloading them whole.