Rights & Usage
Every astrophotograph on Photographing the Night Sky was made by Angela Brand. They are © Copyright Angela Brand, all rights reserved. Each one represents hours of planning, tracking, and processing, often across several nights, and the copyright in them belongs to her from the moment the shutter opens.
Publishing them here is not a release of those rights. Nothing on this site grants a license to reuse the photographs, and no open license anywhere else on this site applies to them.
You’re welcome to
- Look at them, for as long as you like. That is what they are here for.
- Link to this site, or to any page on it, from anywhere.
- Share a link on social media, in a newsletter, or in a class. A link is always fine; a copy of the image is not.
- Ask. Educational, non-commercial, and astronomy-club requests are usually answered with a yes.
Please don’t
Without written permission from Angela Brand, please do not:
- Download, save, screenshot, or otherwise copy the photographs for anything beyond your browser’s ordinary caching.
- Republish or repost them anywhere — websites, blogs, forums, social media, wallpaper sites, stock libraries, or print.
- Hotlink or embed them from this server into another page.
- Crop, recolor, composite, upscale, or otherwise alter them, or present an altered version as Angela’s work.
- Remove or change a credit, signature, watermark, caption, or the copyright and authorship information embedded in the image files.
- Sell them, print them for sale, or use them in advertising, packaging, merchandise, album or book covers, video, or any other commercial product.
- Mint, tokenize, or list them as an NFT or any comparable digital asset.
- Sublicense them, or offer them to anyone else as if the rights were yours to give.
Machine learning and automated collection
Angela Brand expressly reserves all rights of text and data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence training in these photographs. They may not be harvested for, or included in, any dataset used to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a generative model, and they may not be used as reference or conditioning input to one. This reservation is made under Article 4(3) of EU Directive 2019/790 and under any equivalent provision elsewhere. No permission for these uses is granted by their being published here, and none should be inferred from the absence of a technical block.
Search indexing is a different thing, and it is welcome. An assistant or search engine that finds these pages, describes what is on them, and cites them with a working link back is doing something we are glad to have. Reading is not training. It is only the copying of the photographs into training data that is refused here.
Asking for permission
The short answer is usually yes, so it is worth asking. Write to info@nightsky.pictures and say which photograph you mean, where it would appear, how long it would be up, and whether any money is involved. Any permission given is specific to that use: it does not transfer, it does not cover a second use later, and it always requires a visible credit to Angela Brand.
If you find one somewhere it shouldn’t be
Please tell us at info@nightsky.pictures, with a link. Most misuse turns out to be someone who liked a picture and did not think it through, and a polite note usually settles it. Where it does not, Angela reserves every remedy available to her, including takedown notices and the copyright registrations that support a claim.
What this does and doesn’t cover
This statement covers the photographs, along with the captions, descriptions, and other writing on this site. It does not cover the star map. That is built from open astronomical catalogs under their own licenses, which are set out in full under Sources & Credits. Those licenses apply to the catalog data and give you no rights in the photographs; nothing here takes anything away from them either.
The night sky belongs to everyone. These particular pictures of it belong to Angela.