Stargazing Planner: Darksite

Stargazing planner and telescope observing log for amateur astronomers. Know what is worth observing tonight with your telescope, your eyepieces and your sky.

Then log it in seconds in a true red night mode. Works offline. No account, no ads. Pay once, no subscription.

Open Darksite on a clear evening and it lays out your night like an almanac page: your dark window, the moon's schedule, the cloud outlook, and a shortlist of targets picked for your gear. Every pick explains itself in plain words: "M13: peaks 11:24 pm at 68 degrees, fits your 24 mm eyepiece, moon well out of the way, on your Herschel 400 list." No mystery scores. No thousand-object dumps.

Then it runs the session. Queue your targets, work through them at the eyepiece in a genuine red field mode (every screen night-vision safe, down to a custom red keyboard), and capture each observation in seconds: hold the button, say what you saw. Date, time, site, gear, magnification and field of view fill themselves in.

And it keeps your observing life. Every session searchable by object, eyepiece, sky quality or site. Messier, Herschel 400 and Lunar certificate programs track themselves as you log, with validated, coordinator-ready export packages when you are ready to submit.

BUILT FOR OBSERVERS

• Tonight, for your telescope: gear-aware target picks with the reasoning spelled out

• Session queue: plan the night, reorder by transit, carry unfinished targets forward

• A real observing log: seeing and transparency scales, sketches, voice notes, photos

• Gear locker: scopes, eyepieces, filters, Barlows; true field of view, magnification and exit pupil computed for every combination

• Life-lists: Messier, Herschel 400, Lunar; watch the certificates fill in

• Red field mode: near-black and red everywhere, brightness floored, no white flashes

• Sky events: ISS passes, meteor showers, aurora outlook, cloud and conditions

YOURS, PROPERLY

• Private by design: no account, no ads, no tracking. Your log lives on your device

• Works fully offline: the catalog, the math and your log never need a signal

• Your data is never hostage: CSV and JSON export and import, backup and restore, free, always

• Pay once for Pro. No subscription. Ever.

Darksite is not a planetarium. It is the missing half of the hobby: the planner and the logbook, done properly. It works alongside the sky-map app you already own.