WooHoo I Made a Nightscape Calendar!

2025 arrives with Auroras, the Milky Way, and more

I’ve had so many encouraging comments on my nightscape / night sky / astrophotography in the past year, including, “you should have a calendar.” And I’ve been thinking about how to make that happen.

I’m a calendar lover myself, and several years ago I bought a calendar of orca photos taken by a boat captain and tour guide operator on San Juan Island. It was wonderful to bring home an array of images from someone I’d met featuring a subject I was enamored with.

For Christmas gifts last year, I made a photo calendar for my family, which included a holiday every day of the year. Sorting through the previous year’s photos was a sweet way to review the bounty of beauty around me, and culling through numerous and often odd observances that populate each day of the year, and choosing those I knew they’d like (lots of days honoring beer, dogs, cats and cheese) was weirdly fun.

The thought of making a calendar for a wider audience was daunting for several reasons: Producing a calendar from a photo site (like the one Costco forced us over to) is quite pricey. I looked into other printing options that required ordering large (even huge) quantities. And even if I had 500 buyers, I’d have to take orders, arrange for distribution, ship them myself, and collect payment, even add a store to my website. None of which fits into my life, appeals to me, or gets a calendar easily into the hands of my friends and family sprinkled around the country.

I’m delighted to have discovered a print-on-demand solution through lulu.com, a self-publishing platform, that includes calendars as well as books. And now my “Washington Nightscapes 2025 Calendar” is available in just a few clicks.

My calendar features a dozen nightscape images from events in 2024. I culled through hundreds of images, with a lot of “better 1”, “better 2” to come up with a variety of locations for the Milky Way, multiple expressions of the Aurora Borealis, and a few star trails. Here are the images I’ve included. (They’re cropped square here. In the calendar, they are 8.5 x 11.)

I can’t tell you how much both my mom and my sister-in-law have enjoyed the random holidays I included in our 2024 calendar, letting me know when I spoke to them that it was “Houseplant Appreciation Day” (1/10), or “Get Over It Day” (3/9), or “Clean Your Room Day,” (5/10). It was time consuming finding and entering each special day one at a time, but I wanted to make sure you got in all the fun, too. In 2025 you’ll find “World Sword Swallowers Day” (2/24), “Dance Like a Chicken Day” (5/14), “Pluto Demoted Day, (8/24), and 362 more observances!

And last, but not least: I live in a location with miraculous views from my windows and shore that most people must travel to experience. Living at the water’s edge has its challenges (flooding, dead seal pups), yet it is overflowing with beauty, day and night that I’m so grateful to witness.

Making images and offering them on social media, and now in a calendar, is one way I share this abundance, hoping to create community out of what I most often see alone in the dark.

The more I learn about the environment where I reside, the more I recognize its fragility. Here’s is one small thing we can do together to protect the place I call home: I will be donating 50% of my profits, about $3/ per calendar from each calendar sold to the Hood Canal Salmon Enhancement Group, which has provided more than 30 years of salmon research, restoration, and education in the Hood Canal watershed.

I will be donating the other 50% to my local faith community, St. David of Wales Episcopal Church.

I hope you’ll consider purchasing a calendar for yourself, or as a Christmas gift. (Allow about 2 weeks from ordering for delivery.) And please send on this post to others who might be interested. Thanks so much!