Tool

What will my photo look like?

Choose an object, a telescope, how dark your sky is and how long you image. The simulator crops a survey photo to that telescope's real frame and adds the noise you would get from its aperture, your sky glow and your total exposure. Slide the time to watch the object emerge from the noise.

How the simulation works

1. The picture starts from the Pan-STARRS1 survey photo of the object, cropped to the native field of view of the telescope you pick.
2. We scale its brightness so the object has its catalogued surface brightness, then count how much light the telescope's aperture collects from the object and from your sky in the chosen time.
3. Random photon noise is added for that amount of light and the result is stretched the way stacking apps do. Light pollution adds noise, and a longer time averages it away.
4. A dual-band filter blocks most sky glow but also some of the object's light. It helps emission nebulae and does little for galaxies.

It is an estimate, not a test result: it leaves out gradients, satellite trails, tracking errors, sensor quirks and the colour processing of each app. The survey photo is sharper than any smart telescope, so fine detail can look better here than in reality.