While presenting a recent night sky image to our photography club at work this week, I was asked a lot of questions about how to plan those kinds of shots. I hadn’t thought about it for a while, but there can be a lot that goes into it if you have a particular image in mind. My goal is often to try to line up something in the sky (usually the Milky Way) with a landscape scene. To make it work I need to figure out when those things will line up, when the sky will be dark enough to see the stars, and how much light will I want on the landscape, all while also keeping track of the weather and sometimes tides. In this post I will list some of the tools that I use and show how I used them to plan some recent images.

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