Projects

Three things I've built, all of them around astrophotography.

Astrophotography gallery

This site. 73 photographs of nebulae, galaxies, the sun, the moon and the aurora, taken from Norwich and Norfolk and from trips inside the Arctic Circle, each one listing the object, its position and the equipment that took it. Prints and merchandise are sold through the shop. The photographs are all rights reserved.

Interactive Solar System 3D Model

A live model of the solar system in the browser. Planet and moon positions come from published NASA and JPL orbital data and follow the real sky, and the date and speed controls move the whole system through time. Spacecraft fly their real recorded trajectories from JPL Horizons and appear only during their mission dates. Comets fly real orbits, including the ones photographed in this gallery. The photographs themselves float in the sky in the real direction of their subjects and open when clicked. A Milky Way view swaps to the galaxy's measured spiral arms, Sagittarius A* at the centre and the Sun at its measured distance from it. Accurate mode drops the compression and shows the distances as they actually are, which is mostly black, and that emptiness is the point. Every number in it carries its source. Free software under the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence; the source is on GitHub.

Some of what it can answer is written up as questions with the model behind them: where Voyager 1 is now, how far Mars is tonight, and others, each opening the model at the point that shows it.

APD, the astrophotography planning dashboard

Two dashboards for deciding whether tonight is worth setting up for, and for planning what to point at. The weather one puts Meteoblue and the Met Office side by side, scores every night out of 100, and lays out cloud, moonlight, wind and sky brightness hour by hour across the week, daytime included for solar imaging. The sky one is an interactive map running from optical through H alpha and infrared to ultraviolet, X-ray and radio surveys, with a camera field-of-view overlay and a mosaic planner for framing a target, the Messier, NGC, IC and dark nebula catalogues, constellation and coordinate grids, a red night mode to keep your dark adaptation, and time travel to see where a target will sit later. Favourite targets and Telescopius lists sync across devices, and a public endpoint turns the forecast into something an AI assistant can read. Self-hosted: you run it on your own server with your own API keys. Free software under the AGPL-3.0-or-later licence; the source is on GitHub.