AstroGuide Make the most of every night AstroGuide destinations
Credits & acknowledgements
The app is built around public astronomy resources, survey imagery, Apple platform services, open tooling, and feedback from observers who care about making nights under the stars less confusing.
Last updated: September 1, 2026
This page expands the credits bundled inside AstroGuide’s Settings screen. It is not a complete license inventory, but it names the public resources, services, and communities that materially shape the app experience.
When AstroGuide shows source-specific imagery, forecast data, or subject references inside the app, it may also show local attribution near that feature. Those in-app credits remain the most specific reference for a particular screen or data view.
AstroGuide is designed, developed, curated, and packaged by Chris Hollander, with practical feedback from observers testing real planning workflows in the field. Catalog issue reports, sync edge cases, usability notes, and session-review feedback all help make the app calmer and more useful.
AstroGuide bundles an offline deep-sky subject catalog compiled from public catalog artifacts and app-specific normalization passes. Curated metadata adds reviewed names, aliases, classifications, planning notes, signal notes, and source citations where available. Telescope Workshop equipment selectors include curated optical tube, lens, and camera data derived from Astronomy.Tools Field of View equipment options, used with permission and normalized for AstroGuide.
Comet detail metadata may use selected weekly bright-comet magnitudes, comet detail links, source interpretation, and cached small comet images from Aerith by Seiichi Yoshida, used with permission and credited where shown.
Search, subject detail, Capture Studio, and related visual planning surfaces may use catalog imagery, curated fallback media, and survey-atlas material where coverage is useful. Northern emission-region context is especially indebted to public narrowband survey work, with unavailable or blank regions intentionally hidden rather than presented as meaningful guidance.
Weather planning uses Apple WeatherKit where available, then AstroGuide normalizes and caches the forecast context for observing-night scoring. Sky brightness and Bortle context use bundled lookup data derived from published light-pollution resources. Observed cloud context, where shown, uses NOAA/NESDIS GOES imagery products through app-specific display and availability logic.
DarkSky place information is provided courtesy of DarkSky International. AstroGuide uses the organization’s public place records to help observers discover designated dark-sky parks, reserves, sanctuaries, communities, urban night sky places, and approved lodging. Individual place records retain visible attribution, source links, source timestamps, and available image credits.
AstroGuide is built for Apple platforms and uses Apple frameworks and services for the app interface, persistence, iCloud sync, notifications, maps and location integration, weather access, local storage, and system URL handling.
Planetary Mode ephemeris calculations use AstronomyKit, integrated through Swift Package Manager.
AstroPlan is AstroGuide’s proposed contribution to the broader astrophotography app community: a small, readable, JSON-based schedule format that can help planning tools, observing logs, smart-telescope apps, and capture controllers exchange target lists and scheduled observing plans more easily.
AstroGuide uses open source and platform tooling during development, testing, catalog preparation, release validation, and website publishing. The public site is built with Astro and hosted with GitHub Pages.
If you notice a catalog citation, media source, survey attribution, or description that should be corrected, please include the subject identifier, a screenshot is also helpful, and the path you used to find it.
Send an attribution note