About Stellar Nomads
Stellar Nomads is an astrophotography and practical-astronomy resource built by imagers, for imagers. Our mission is simple: cut through the jargon and give you clear, field-tested guidance for capturing the night sky, whether you are framing your first shot of the Orion Nebula or dialing in a fully remote observatory on the other side of the world.
Who is behind Stellar Nomads?
The site is founded and written by Hamza, an astrophotographer who has been chasing photons since 2008. Over the better part of two decades, imaging has taken him from light-polluted city backyards to some of the darkest skies on the planet. Much of what you will read here is distilled from that hands-on experience, the mistakes and the workarounds included, rather than repackaged from spec sheets.
Our remote observatory in Chile
A large part of our deep-sky work is done from a remote rig hosted in the Rio Hurtado valley of Chile, at a site that sits under genuine Bortle 1 skies, the darkest classification on the Bortle scale. The exceptional atmospheric stability of the Chilean Andes is exactly why so many professional and amateur observatories are built there, and it lets us image faint targets with detail that is simply out of reach from most home locations.
The imaging train is built around serious hardware: an Alluna Optics 12.5-inch Ritchey-Chretien telescope riding on a Paramount MX Plus robotic mount, paired with an SBIG STL-11000 CCD camera. Running a system like this remotely, with plate-solving, autoguiding and fully automated sequencing, is precisely the kind of real-world problem-solving we write about. The tutorials on this site come from a working setup, not from theory.
What you will find here
Stellar Nomads covers the full journey from complete beginner to advanced remote imager:
- Guides and tutorials on telescopes and mounts, polar alignment, focusing, autoguiding, plate-solving, and the full acquisition-to-processing workflow.
- Deep-sky and solar-system explainers covering what nebulae, stars, galaxies and the planets actually are, and how best to photograph each of them.
- Free astronomy calculators, including our field-of-view simulator and our integration-time, critical-focus-zone, autoguider and sub-exposure calculators, so you can plan a session before you ever open the roof.
Why you can trust our guides
Every guide is written from direct experience and checked against how the gear behaves in the real world. When something is a matter of preference rather than fact, we say so, and if we have not personally tested a piece of equipment or a technique, we tell you that too. We would rather be honest and useful than chase clicks with claims we cannot stand behind.
Get in touch
Questions, corrections, or an image you are proud of? You can follow the journey and reach out on Instagram at @stellar.nomads, or contact us through the site. We read everything, and reader feedback regularly shapes what we cover next.