What the Studio Makes
Games first. Everything else is downstream of that.
Deep Sky Creations builds downloadable games, browser-based interactive pieces, and reference work about the actual universe. The commercial centre of it is the games — that is where the development time goes and where the studio intends to make its living.
The rest is not a side project either. The launch simulator on this site runs patched-conics orbital mechanics rather than an animation that looks about right. The trivia questions come out of the same catalogue that feeds the atlas. When something on this site claims to model the real thing, it models the real thing, because that is the only version worth building.
It Started With the Sky
Before any of this was a studio it was a telescope in a back garden in Michigan, under a sky that is not remotely dark enough, pointed at galaxies that do not care whether anyone is watching. That is where the name came from.
When I capture a deep-sky object I am not just collecting an image. I am collecting time. Some of that light began its journey long before any of us were here to see it. It traveled through space, crossed unimaginable distance, and finally landed in the sensor of a telescope on one small planet.
The astronomy is not the studio's past tense. It is still being made, and it is the reason the studio has a point of view about space at all rather than a mood board.
Exploring the Real Universe, Creating Impossible Ones
Wanting to know how a thing works well enough to build a working model of it is the same impulse whether the thing is an asteroid field or a transfer orbit. Astrophotography is an exercise in paying very close attention to something enormous for a very long time and getting almost nothing back for it. Building a game is the same exercise pointed the other way — inventing the enormous thing, then paying it the same attention.
So the studio's fiction is not decorated with space; it is built by someone who has spent years looking at the real one. Deep space is quiet, violent, slow, and mostly empty. A game that knows that is a different game from one that thinks space is a purple background with lens flare.
That relationship is the whole studio, and it is why the catalogue, the orrery and the observing tools sit on the same site as the games rather than on a separate hobby page. They are the research. They just happen to be worth publishing.
How a Photograph Gets Made
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Capture
The process begins with patience: planning targets, waiting for clear skies, collecting faint light, and letting the telescope reveal what the human eye could never gather on its own.
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Shape
The raw data is carefully refined to bring out structure, color, contrast, and depth. The goal is not to fake the universe, but to reveal the beauty already hiding in the signal.
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Share
The finished frame goes into the gallery with its exposure, its gear and its conditions recorded beside it — and, for some of them, onto something you can hang on a wall.
What Exists Right Now
A studio should be able to answer this without a roadmap slide, so: everything below is live on this site today, and nothing that is not is listed.
- Games
- Starhauler , plus the launch simulator and space trivia in the browser.
- Space
- An astrophotography gallery of original captures, a catalogue of deep-sky objects sourced from SIMBAD, NED and NASA, a live orrery of the solar system, and observing tools that answer for your own sky.
- Store
- Prints and goods carrying the photography from the gallery.
One last thought
Look Up
The universe has a way of making us feel small and capable at the same time. Small because the scale is almost impossible to hold in your head. Capable because we can see it anyway, work out how it moves, and then go build something that has never existed.
That is the whole studio, and it is why the two halves of this site sit together. If you want to talk about any of it, the contact page says where to write.