About AstroHelper

AstroHelper is a session-planning tool for astrophotographers. 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 deep-sky objects worth imaging on a given night, with suggested start/stop times. It does not use AI and is completely free to use.

The app is designed for backyard astrophotographers who want to make the most of their limited It was created because my backyard has a number of trees that block the horizon, and I wanted a way to quickly see which objects would be visible from my site on a given night without having to manually check each one in Stellarium or SkySafari. 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, Moon interference) - not a rigorous imaging simulator. Always sanity-check recommendations against your own experience.

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