Photos should be oriented with forward being north, or up being towards celestial north in the case of sky images.

Matthew Christopher Bartsh
1 min readFeb 18, 2021

I think photos, videos, animations, drawings, paintings, or virtual reality or other images in 3D or 2D, that, like most maps, face due north and are labelled accordingly are best. This way, the orientation of things in the picture is made known to the reader.I think photos should by default face due north.
Astronomy images, photos or whatever, likewise should come with indication of orientation, so right ascension and declination of a single point are not enough, there needs to be some indication of which way up the image is, which is best provided by indicating which way it is to the celestial north pole. This is especially urgent with images of galaxies and planets which are frequently upside down if I can say that (because of how telescopes work, I think). I think astronomy images by default should have celestial north up.

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Matthew Christopher Bartsh

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