Astrophotography Apps, Artifacts, and Science Fiction
Astrophotography
Follow along an astrophotographer on social media and see the nighttime show through his lens.
Video
What I Found in Your Backyard
A short-form series from See the Show — one deep-sky object per episode, brought back from a backyard under dark skies, and the story hiding inside it.
Mobile Apps
Sidestep Studio's Moondance
A configurable, long-range, multi-target, moon-aware, deep-sky imaging session planner.
- Plans imaging sessions weeks or months in advance
- Finds the dark hours automatically with moon-aware scheduling
- Graphically compares the availability and visibility of multiple targets simultaneously against the moon
- Provides smart suggestions to fill gaps in your imaging schedule
- Imports custom targets via CSV
- Configures altitudinal clearances using eight compass points
- And more
Web Apps
Astro Lava Lamp
Useful enough to plan by
Pretty enough to leave on screen.
- A real altitude-by-date mapping of 217 deep sky objects that traces them in slow-shifting pools of color — like a lava lamp
- Planets and comets too
- The display is your sky, from your location, not a generic one
- Adjustable settings
- With its Play feature, the chart shifts and glows day-by-day
- Includes a leaderboard and push race showing targets as they race for the top
- It can highlight specific DSOs
- Runs in the browser — nothing to install
Sidestep Studio's Astro Dust Up
A plate-solved blink tool for telling real interstellar dust from a processing gradient.
Watch the demo (3 min)
- Fetches a real WISE / IR dust map of any deep-sky target
- Plate-solves your stacked image and aligns it to the sky automatically
- Verifies alignment on a star reference before comparing dust
- Hard A/B blink between your image and the dust map
- Reveals faint dust filaments with a gamma + black-point stretch
- Remembers each solved image for 30 days so re-checking is instant
- Installs as a web app on phone, tablet, or desktop
Lefty’s Focal Length Lecture
An animated chalkboard that shows what the f-number actually measures — and what it hides.
- Watch the same light land on two boards and see which one finishes first — and why that was never about speed
- Four panels: focal length alone, aperture alone, two real scopes, and a split test
- The split test takes your telescope, your seeing and your pixel size, and answers one question — can it separate that pair tonight
- Scrub the chalk anywhere and resume the animation from there
- A companion page shows all of the math, with every assumption named
- Runs in the browser — nothing to install
Works of Fiction
See the Show! · Coming soon to reading glasses near you.
Fiction · Sci-FiAfter a near-extinction-level event, the country appears back to normal. It is far from it. Strangers are still killing strangers over resources that are no longer in short supply — a psychological cancer eating away at the fabric of society.
In a post-modern world at the dawn of the transhuman age, can one man driving a beat-up van stop it? See the Show! tells the story of an unlikely pair: a gun-toting clown and his female AI sidekick. Alone, the two go up against those who would murder others in an undeclared stranger war.
Get Your Copy