About

Bortle 1 Box is a site dedicated to making astrophotography data available for beginner astrophotographers and enthusiasts who are looking for free data they can practice and develop their skills on.

One of the very frustrating things for beginner astrophotographers when learning is not having much data to practice with. Most new AP’ers are not getting good results at first and are often wondering if their data is bad but unfortunately do not have anything to compare it with.

I began astrophotography in the summer of 2023 and went through all these frustrations and questions. Am I good at this ? Should I continue ? Why am I not getting results, is it me that is no good or is it my data ? Trust me, we’ve all been there and I often still am.

So why this site ? Because I think all astrophotography data should be public and shared unless the owner makes a living out of it. After all if NASA makes their data available for free why shouldn’t we ?

So let’s talk about this data. If you download the data from this site you should not expect high quality mono images taken with super expensive cameras, LRGB filters and telescopes with focal lengths from here to next month like you would from other sites. Simply said, do not expect Hubble or JWST quality data. If you do there’s a good chance you’ll be disappointed. Everything here is OSC and as of now taken with a 135mm camera lens. I do not pretend my data is of high quality nor do I claim you can win NASA’s Astronomy Image of the Day (APOD) or Astrobin’s IOTD or Top Picks.

If however you are looking for data to practice your processing skills I think you’ll be happy with what I offer.

Maybe you want to give a shot at mosaic but you’re afraid of shooting it because your imaging time is limited and you don’t want to risk wasting it ? At the time of this writing there is one set of mosaic data available but there will be more in the future.

Allright, ‘nough talking, so what’s the catch you wonder ? Well there isn’t any, it’s totally free. It’s all published under Creative Commons licence and yours to use as you want with a few exceptions.

• You are prohibited from using the data from this site in any way, shape or form for commercial activity. Short version, it’s free to you but you can’t use it to make money.
• You are prohibited from using whatever you produce from this data in any way, shape or form for commercial activiy. Short version, it’s free to you but you can’t use it to make money.
• You are nicely, kindly, politely asked to give proper credits to this site should you publish your results anywhere and if me asking nice is not enough, you are still obligated to do it as per the Creative Commons licence ;). Anything like “The data used to produce this image is a courtesy of Bortle 1 Box” with a link back to here so others can benefit from it is good enough as far as I’m concerned.

Well, this is it then. Oh no, actually it’s not. Let’s talk a little more about the data that you’ll find here. Well to say it quickly:

• It’s all data taken by me.
• They were all shot in a Bortle 1 location (Doh !!! If they came from a B2 location this site would be called B2Box right ?).
• That location is Starfront Observatories in Texas where my equipment is located.
• Each dataset has a “Profile” with details on when it was shot, what equipment was used, number of subs, their exposure time, total integration time and all that stuff.

Well this is it now…..for real……promised……..telling you……nope, got nothing else to say, I swear on the Witch Head Nebula !!!!