Nova · Cosmic Liaison
Free starter guide

Your first night
under the stars,
actually planned.

Most first attempts end in blurry smudges and a cold walk back to the car. Nova's First Light Kit is the illustrated guide that fixes that — settings, star charts, and the free software nobody tells beginners about.

Send me the kit

Instant download. Plus a short 7-night walkthrough by email.

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M42
Orion Target 02 · Beginner
What's inside

Fourteen pages. No filler.

01

The settings cheat sheet

Aperture, ISO, and shutter speed explained without the lecture — plus the 500 Rule worked out for every common focal length, on both full-frame and crop sensors.

02

Settings by scenario

One table for the Milky Way, star trails, the Moon, planets, and tracked deep-sky. Find your situation, copy the numbers, go outside.

03

Five targets, with star charts

What's up right now, what lens frames it well, and printed finder charts showing exactly where to look — Orion to M42, Cassiopeia to Andromeda.

04

The free software list

Planning, weather, stacking, and editing — every tool that costs nothing, with a plain-English note on when you'd actually reach for each one.

The five targets

Start with something bright.

Our galaxy
Milky Way Core
Late March – September
M42
Orion Nebula
November – March
M31
Andromeda Galaxy
August – February
M45
The Pleiades
October – March
Luna
The Moon
Any clear night
"Beep-boop, friend. I came here to catalog cosmic phenomena and got distracted by you humans standing in cold fields, waiting for light that left its star a thousand years ago."

I crash-landed in a dark-sky preserve and never quite got the ship working again. What I did get working: a way to explain all of this without the jargon. No gear snobbery, no assumed knowledge — just the parts that actually matter, in order.

Nova — Andromeda sector, currently grounded

The sky's already up there.

Grab the kit, pick a clear night, and go point a camera at something four hundred light-years away.

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