Astrophotography Target Planner: Discover Hidden Nebulas

Summary

Have you ever gone out on a clear night, fired up Stellarium, scrolled through endless objects… and still ended up shooting Andromeda for the seventh time?That was me, over and over. I love M31, but at some point I realised I wasn’t really exploring the sky anymore – I was just defaulting to the same “safe” ten targets. So I ended up building my own astrophotography target planner. The process of finding something new that was visible, well placed, matched my focal length, and wasn’t completely impossible from my Bortle 5 backyard was just too much friction.So I built a tool to fix that:How my planner app looks on a desktopMy Astrophotography Target Planner helped me discover objects like NGC 7822 and the Question Mark Nebula – targets I genuinely didn’t know existed a few months ago. In this article, I’ll break down the main ideas from the video so you can see how it works and whether it might actually help you plan your own sessions.Watch the full walkthrough of my Astrophotography Target Planner here: VIDEOWhat You’ll Learn in This VideoIn the video, I walk through how I’ve gone from “winging it” every clear night to planning genuinely new targets in minutes.You’ll see:How I used to plan targets manually with Stellarium (and why I kept ending up on the same objects).What the Astro Target app does differently – filtering by location, visibility, focal length, and difficulty.How “Discovery Mode” surfaces lesser‑known nebulae that are actually well suited to your gear.Examples of hidden gems like NGC 7822, the Headphone Nebula, and the Question Mark Nebula.How the app’s timing, RA/Dec, and difficulty notes help you decide if a target is realistic from your sky.Why this change in workflow helped me go from ~10 repeat targets to over 40 different deep sky objects in a year.Key TakeawaysFrom Manual Hunting to Smart Target SelectionFor years, my target selection routine looked like this:Open Stellarium.Scroll through a long list of objects.Check what’s visible tonight.C...