A common challenge for nightscape or deepscape photographers is determining which targets are shootable against a specific foreground and when, in order to compose a compelling photograph.
Standard astronomy or planetarium apps will tell you what’s up when, but won’t let you filter by minimum altitude, moon altitude, phase or angular separation, and won’t show how the potential targets line up against your planned foreground subject.
Sky View does all of that, and more.
Example: Convict Lake
Convict Lake is a beautiful alpine lake nestled amongst the mountains of the Eastern Sierra in California. The horizon is jagged and uneven. It’s very hard to know which DSOs will appear when and how long they may be shootable for. Here’s an example, taken on October 6, 2026.
Our group was interested to know which other DSOs might be available to shoot once the Milky Way core began to set as the evening wore on. Let’s look at how Sky View can answer that question.
Sky View for Convict Lake
From the Celestial Targets page, choose a list, for example, Northern Hemisphere Beginner Targets. This gives you the set of targets under consideration. You can build up your own Favorites list by marking any list entry using the heart icon.
Next, choose the Sky tab on the page.
Here’s the view looking East, away from the lake. You can drag the camera in the 3D view to see the view in any direction, or zoom in and out to adjust the field of view:
The labeled paths show how the list targets move through the sky, irrespective of date and time, for this exact location, set against the landscape.
Note: The path of any celestial object is essentially constant over time. What changes is the time of day at which we can observe it, due to the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
Let’s review the controls above the 3D Sky View:
- Any Time vs Date Range: switch from the year-round view (independent of time) to looking at a specific date range. Generally, you’ll want to start with the Any Time view and see which targets work for your location, prior to narrowing down desirable shooting windows
- Search field: you can search for a specific target in the list using this field
- Types: if you like emission nebulae but are uninterested in globular clusters, filter down to only what you want to see here
- Dec: filter by declination to see only targets that are circumpolar to the north, for example
- Mag: set an optional magnitude filter to limit the list to brighter targets, for example
- Show: show or hide additional reference data, such as the equatorial grid, Polaris, etc.
The number of targets (determined by the list you chose) is shown at the right.
Minimum Altitude
A minimum altitude filter can be configured either in the Visibility Settings panel at the right, or via the draggable slider at the left of the Sky View. You may wish to increase the minimum altitude requirement to avoid imaging DSOs that are low in the sky and affected by haze or light pollution.
Parts of the target paths below the minimum altitude threshold are shown as dashed lines.
Setting a Date Range
Choose Date Range instead of Any Time, and the Sky View is further filtered to show when targets are shootable inside a specific time window, for example, the week of your visit to the Eastern Sierra. Notice how the number of solid paths is now reduced to a handful: these are the DSOs that can be imaged in the selected time period (here, three nights from Oct 5, 2026):
This is essentially the result from the Calendar for your selected time period, displayed in the 3D view. Just as in the calendar, you can filter this view to give only targets that offer more than a certain amount of imaging time (particularly important for deepscape and pure astrophotography, where multiple hours might be required).
If you like to shoot evenings, but not early mornings, you can restrict the display to only those targets that are shootable between the hours you specify. Here, the targets are filtered for the hours 8:15pm to 10:30pm (very civilized!):
Finally, we can declutter by enabling “ Usable only ” and then enabling the Positions switch to check out a specific date and time in our window. Here, we can see that the Pleiades rises above our minimum altitude threshold at around 9:25pm on Mon, Oct 5:
Once you have a particular target in mind, such as the California Nebula, you can click on the path to see additional information and options:
Context Menu Options
A right-click anywhere in the 3D Sky View shows a context menu with additional options. Adding a DSO target as one of the selected bodies/targets on the map is particularly useful:
Pleiades at Convict Lake
We used the Sky view to determine that along with the California Nebula, the Pleiades, M45 would come into view around by around 9:25pm, providing a new target to shoot after the Milky Way had largely set behind the topography to the west. Here’s how it looked that evening, a stack of five 2-minute exposures at 120mm (shorter than ideal in all respects):
