About StarYard

StarYard is a session-planning tool for astrophotographers as well as visual observing. It combines your equipment's optical capabilities, your site's actual sky visibility (from an uploaded panorama), live weather, and light-pollution (Bortle) conditions to recommend objects worth imaging on a given night, with suggested start/stop times. It does not use AI and is completely free to use.

I originally created this for myself because my backyard has a number of trees that block the horizon at different heights across the horizon. I wanted a way to quickly see which objects would be visible from my yard on a given night without having to manually check each one in Stellarium or SkySafari. Because I can easily see when they will clear any obstructions like our house or trees, it was a great way to very quickly get an initial plan together.

I hope it helps you too!

Suitability scoring is a planning heuristic based on standard rules of thumb (aperture-based limiting magnitude, field-of-view fit, Bortle/narrowband interaction, and Moon interference). It was never meant to be a rigorous imaging simulator, so always sanity-check recommendations against your own experience.

I still recommend using a planetarium app like Stellarium before you head out, but this app gives me a quick idea if a session is even worth it.