Milky Way Planner
Milky Way Planner is a planning tool I built for astrophotographers who want to know exactly when and where to shoot the Milky Way, without spending an evening clicking through a calendar one date at a time.
If you photograph the night sky, you already know the planning is half the work. You need the core of the galaxy above the horizon, the moon out of the way, dark skies, and a weekend you can actually get out. Milky Way Planner answers all of that on a single screen, for any location on Earth.
Why planning Milky Way photography is harder than it should be
Most astrophotography apps make you check one night at a time. You pick a date, read the numbers, decide it is no good, and repeat. To find the good weekends across a whole season you end up doing that dozens of times, and it is easy to miss the best windows entirely.
The information you need is not hard to compute. It is just scattered across sunrise and sunset times, moonrise and moonset, moon phase, and the hours the galactic core is actually visible. Milky Way Planner pulls all of that together so you can see the season at a glance instead of one date at a time.
How Milky Way Planner works
Enter a location and a year, and Milky Way Planner shows your entire Milky Way season on one screen. Every night is color coded so you can scan months in seconds:
- Green nights are excellent, with the core high and the moon out of the way.
- Yellow nights are workable if the timing lines up.
- Gray nights are the ones to skip.
Click into any night for the detail that matters in the field: sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset, moon phase, and the exact window the galactic core is above the horizon. It takes about a minute to go from “I want to shoot the Milky Way this year” to a shortlist of the nights worth planning around.
Free annual Milky Way calendars
The core of Milky Way Planner is free. Enter your location and you get a personalized twelve month Milky Way visibility calendar you can:
- Share with a link, so a group can plan the same trip from the same view.
- Print to PDF and pin up wherever you keep your shooting notes.
- Use to lock in the good weekends before they fill up.
For a lot of photographers, the free calendar is all they ever need.
Premium tools for serious planning
Premium is $25 a year and adds the tools you want once you are planning real trips:
- Moon Planner gives you moonrise and moonset times and directions, twilight data, and supermoon tracking, so you can work the moon into your composition instead of around it.
- Trip Planner builds multi stop itineraries with visibility scored for each location, then exports the whole plan to your calendar.
- Full Exports hand you the underlying data as Excel spreadsheets and ICS calendar files so it syncs straight into how you already work.
Who it is for
Milky Way Planner is built for landscape and astrophotographers who plan ahead: the people mapping out a dark sky trip months in advance, coordinating a group shoot, or just trying to catch the few great nights near home each season. If you have ever driven hours to a location only to find the moon washing out the sky, this is the tool that prevents it.
Why I built it
I shoot the Milky Way myself, from the mountains of Colorado and the deserts of the Southwest, and I got tired of the date-by-date grind every planning season. I wanted to see the whole year at once, decide fast, and spend my time shooting instead of clicking. So I built the tool I wished existed, and now thousands of photographers use it to plan their nights.