Privacy
This site is a place to look at photographs of the night sky. It is run by one person, it sells nothing, and it has no interest in who you are. There are no ads, no trackers, no advertising cookies, and nothing here is shared with or sold to anybody. This page explains, in plain terms, the small amount of information the site does handle.
The short version
- We count pages viewed, using software that runs on our own server. Nobody else receives that data.
- The counter sets no cookies and does not follow you between websites.
- There is no account to create, no newsletter, no comment section, and no form to fill in.
- Fonts, images, scripts, and the star map all load from this site. Nothing is fetched from a third party as you browse.
- We never sell, rent, or trade information about visitors. There is no advertising relationship of any kind.
Who runs this site
Photographing the Night Sky is published by Angela Brand in the United States. Because the site is reachable from anywhere, visitors arrive from outside the US too, and this policy is written with that in mind. For anything on this page, including a request about your own information, write to info@nightsky.pictures.
Visitor statistics
We like knowing that people come and look, and which photographs they linger on. To find that out we use a self-hosted analytics plugin that runs inside this WordPress installation and writes to this site’s own database. It is not Google Analytics. No analytics company, advertising network, or other outside service receives anything about your visit.
What the counter records
- The page you looked at, and the date and time.
- The page that sent you here, if you followed a link, and the search terms if a search engine passes them along.
- Your country, and in some cases the region, worked out from your network address.
- Rough details of the device: whether it is a phone, tablet, or computer, the browser name, and the operating system.
What it does not do
It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device for the purpose of counting. It does not build a profile of you, does not follow you to other websites, and has no way to learn your name, your email address, or anything else that identifies you personally. Your network address is used briefly, in memory, to work out a country and to tell one visit apart from another; it is not kept in the statistics we can read. What is left in the database is a count of anonymous visits, which is all we wanted in the first place.
If you would rather not be counted at all, browser privacy settings, tracker-blocking extensions, and Do Not Track signals will generally stop the counter from running. Nothing on the site breaks if you block it, and no page will nag you about it.
Cookies
Reading this site sets no cookies. That is why there is no consent banner in your way: there is nothing to consent to. Your browser may cache pages and images so the site loads faster next time, which is a normal part of how browsing works and is not something we can see.
Nothing loads from anywhere else
A lot of websites quietly hand your visit to other companies simply by loading a typeface, an embedded video, or a script from somewhere else. This one does not. The fonts, the photographs, the star map, and every script are served from this site. There are no social media embeds, no video players, no comment widgets, no maps, and no advertising or analytics code belonging to anyone else. When you look at a page here, your browser talks to this site and to nobody else.
Server logs
This site is hosted in the United States. Like every web server, the machine serving these pages keeps a technical log of the requests it receives, and that log includes network addresses. These logs exist so the site can be kept running and defended against attacks and abuse. They are rotated and discarded after a short period, they are not used to study visitors, and they are never combined with the visitor statistics above. DreamHost holds them as our hosting provider and for no purpose of its own.
If you write to us
There is no contact form here, so the only way to reach us is by email. If you do, we will have your email address and whatever you chose to put in the message, held in an ordinary mailbox. We use it to answer you and to keep track of any permission we have given. We do not add you to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list. Ask us to delete the correspondence and we will, unless it records a permission or a copyright matter we may need later.
How long anything is kept
Visitor statistics are anonymous and are kept indefinitely, because a chart of how the site has grown is the whole point of collecting them and there is nobody in that data to identify. Server logs turn over on our host’s schedule, typically within a few weeks. Email is kept as long as the conversation is useful.
We do not sell your information
We do not sell, rent, trade, or share information about visitors with anyone, for money or for anything else, and we have never done so. We do not share it for advertising of any kind, targeted or otherwise. The only circumstances in which we would hand anything over are a valid legal demand we are obliged to answer, or a genuine need to protect the site or someone’s safety.
Visitors in the EU and UK
The site is operated from the United States and hosted there, so if you visit from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, the pages you view are served from the US and the statistics are stored there. Where any of this counts as personal data, we rely on our legitimate interest in understanding whether anyone is reading the site and in keeping it running securely. That interest is a modest one, and it is why the statistics are deliberately anonymous rather than detailed.
You have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to our using it, and to complain to your national data protection authority. Write to info@nightsky.pictures and we will answer. In practice, unless you have emailed us, we will almost certainly have to tell you that we hold nothing that could be traced back to you, because the statistics simply do not record enough to find one person in them.
Visitors in California and other US states
Several US states give residents the right to know what personal information a business holds about them, to have it deleted, and to opt out of its sale or of targeted advertising. This site is a personal, non-commercial project and is not the kind of business those laws are aimed at, but the answers are simple in any case: we sell nothing, we share nothing for advertising, we do no targeted advertising, and we collect no sensitive information. If you want to exercise a right anyway, write to info@nightsky.pictures and we will treat the request seriously, and we will not treat you any differently for asking.
Children
This site is for anyone who likes looking at the sky, children very much included. It asks nobody for personal information, so we do not knowingly collect anything from a child. If you believe a child has sent us something they should not have, tell us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
If the site ever gains something that changes the picture — a contact form, a print shop, an embedded video — this page will be updated to say so before that goes live. The date below is the last time it changed. This policy was last updated on August 1, 2026.
The sky is free to look at, and so is this. We would rather count stars than visitors.