Chasing the Sun/Moon…

Getting shots like this is not an accident -

Lighthouse & Moon

They just take a ‘little’ bit of planning.  To have a rough idea of where the moon and sun will make an appearance, I use a couple of bits of software. The first one is, the universal ‘Google Earth‘  and the other is a piece of shareware called ‘Heavenly Opportunity‘. Its well worth spending the few quid to register it, but as its shareware, download it and have a play. (I also have a proper compass and maps but we won’t get into that level of geekery here…)

Amongst the things that Heavenly Opportunity does, is allow you to predict where the moon/sun will rise/set.  (I’ve already got a small file of printouts for my upcoming holiday – sad, but true!) – and its relatively easy to do. You just need to use a couple of tools available to you in Google Earth, namely the pushpins and ruler.

First thing you need to do is set the option in Google Earth to make it display its Longtitude and Latitude in decimal format, as Heavenly Opportunity is a lot more precise by using this format. Do this by going to tools/options then pick ‘Decimal Degrees’ under Show Lat/Long.

Once you’ve done that, you have the simple matter of deciding where you want to stand (roughly) and take your photograph from. In this example, I wanted to stand somewhere on the inner wave screen in Seaham docks, and take some pictures of the moon rising alongside the lighthouse.

Drop a pushpin onto the map of where you want to stand, give it a name. Then rightclick on it and get its properties. If you have changed it to decimal, it should look something like this -

Now, with your digital Latitude and longtitude numbers, fire up the Heavenly Opportunity Software, and enter the numbers into the location box. Make sure you change the timezone to the correct one (or you get to hang around for a couple of hours like me) Then pick your date from the calendar.  What you will get is a whole load of data about what time the sun/moon rises and sets. The important stuff though is the AZIMUTH, which is the degrees from North.

So, you can see for my date the Azimuth for the moon rise was 106.6 degrees…. so I know from the location I picked, that the moon would rise approximimately 106 degrees from North, at 7:05pm. Good eh? Now, I could take a compass, go to the location and check out if would work – or I could do another quick check in Google earth and see if it works out…

So, back to Google earth, and pick the ruler tool. Start drawing a line from your pushpin, and notice that the ‘Heading’ number changes – this just so happens to correspond from North so I drew a line until the heading matched up with the 106.6 degree Azimuth as predicted by ‘Heavenly Opportunity’ – Here’s the line I expected to see the moon rise along -

And sure enough the moon made an appearance, where I was expecting it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to land planes or sail ships using this technique, but it improves your chances of getting the moon/sun in the position on your picture that you want.

P.S. My last post for a while – take care everyone. See you all soon!

~ by David on July 24, 2009.