Moondance
Methodical Imaging Planner
Plan astrophotography sessions around the moon, your targets, and your sky. See a full year of imaging windows at a glance.
Moondance is an iOS planning app for amateur astrophotographers. In a nutshell, it is all about tracking and collecting images of your favorite DSOs. Astrophotography can be more rewarding with its methodical approach. With Moondance you don't hunter-gather targets with a sky atlas, you work your collections across the seasons, tracking which DSOs are reachable when and where and under what moon. Moondance is built for that workflow where every target has a season, and every night in its season is different. The target's availability shifts from night to night as does the waxing and waning moon.
Most astronomy apps show you the sky. Moondance shows you when to image it.
SkySafari, Stellarium, and the rest are beautiful sky maps — they render constellations, planets, and deep-sky objects in real time. Perfect for visual observers, navigation, education.
But if you're an imager, you're not asking "what's in the sky right now." You're asking:
- Which of my targets are imageable this week, or this month?
- When is the moon out of the way of them?
- Can I fit M51 and NGC 4236 in tonight, given when each clears my horizon?
- I've shot 53 Messier objects — which is the easiest next one this month?
Atlas tools don't really answer those questions. Moondance does. It answers "what should I shoot, given what I want and what the sky's doing?"
With my Origin telescope I just imaged a dark nebula in Atlanta — under a full moon, in the city glow. Moondance found the targets minimally affected by the moonlight… see for yourself how it turned out.
Key Features
Collections (with thumbnails) let you group and save targets by constellation, object type, season, equipment, or any criteria you choose. Once saved, you can easily pull from these collections to build a target list for any given night.
Night Scrubber — Drag the clock hand around the sky dome to sweep through the night from sunset to sunrise. Watch constellations rise and set in real time. Use it to scout what's available at specific hours or to catch targets that are only up for a short window.
Smart Moon Handling — Moondance is built around the idea that the Moon's phase and position should not automatically rule out imaging. With adjustable moon tolerance settings, you can identify usable imaging time based on your equipment, abilities, and preferences.
Search over 2,000 deep sky objects, with a Messier tracker built in to record progress on all 108.
All the revolving data for DSOs in constant slow motion, richly complex yet simplistically beautiful, is pulled together and presented in a clear graphical interface.
With Moondance, plan methodically and image with intention.
See it in action
Use Moondance for WHEN a target is up
Planning a Wednesday Night: Iris Nebula
Before you sign up
Skim the Quick Start or the User Guide to see whether Moondance fits how you image.