Planning Sunset and Sunrise Landscape Photography with TPE 3.3

Sunrise at Topaz Lake on the California / Nevada Border

Planning landscape photography has traditionally been a process of considering a combination of location and weather.  If you have a general understanding of the geography of a region, you could look at weather forecasts a few days ahead of time and anticipate where and when the best photographic opportunities might present themselves.  During the course of a day you could modify your plan even further, and decide where to be for sunset based on where you see the best cloud formations developing, and where enough breaks in the clouds might let light through.

In recent years the availability of maps and satellite imagery online in programs like +Google Maps made the location planning easier.  The availability of fairly detailed weather forecasts days in advance through the National Weather Service made the choice of where to go in a region a little easier.  Apps like   +The Photographer's Ephemeris added lines to show the direction of the sun and moon at any time of day or night, so you could anticipate the exact sun rise and set time, general sunlight illumination during the "golden hour" before sunset and after sunrise, as well as anticipate the location of the moon.

Forecast for August 2, 2015

The latest version 3.3 of The Photographer's Ephemeris uses the SkyFire service to check weather forecasts to predict sunrise and sunset color, and show a color-coded overlay on a map of the region your're in.  The more red the color, the higher the probability of sunset color,  The mroe blue to clear it is, the lower the probability. You can see the forecast two to four days in advance depending upon what level of service you'e enrolled to receive.

Another handy feature of SkyFire is to compare forecasts for a list of favorite locations that you've saved, so you can decide between locations to drive to, in order to have the best odds of a nice sunset.

I've tested these features a number of times now, and they do well at predicting when there will or won't be sunset color.  Weather forecasting is notoriously imprecise, so of course you can't predict the direction or extent of the color, but so far the correlation between the SkyFire forecast and the outcome is impressive.

Here's the sunset that actually occurred with the forecast shown to the right for August 2:

Multi-day SkyFire forecast on TPE

The multi-day SkyFire forecast format is shown to the right. The bright red box showed a potentially vivid sunrise opportunity at Lake Tahoe.

The SkyFire service is an optional in-app purchase for TPE, with prices as follows:

Top In-App Purchases

1. Location Synch (1 year)$0.99
2. Skyfire Plus (3-months)$14.99
3. Skyfire (3-months)$9.99

There is also a new location synchronization feature, which finally enabled me to sync my iPhone TPE with my Windows TPE.  There was a procedure to do it before that I had not been able to complete.  With this new method it was quick and simple.

If you don't already have TPE, here's a link that you can use to find it in the Apple iStore:

The Photographer's Ephemeris - Crookneck Consulting LLC

Crookneck Consulting also offers a Photo Transit app which enables you to anticipate what focal length you'll need to capture a certain field of view to get the shot that you want:

The Photographer's Transit - Crookneck Consulting LLC

I'm also testing TPE 3.4, so I'll probably have some details on that for you shortly!

Another sunset accurately predicted by SunFire

Tutorial on Moon Photography Planning

Moon in lunar eclipse, perched on San Francisco's Transamerica Building

Tonight I'll be broadcasting a live tutorial on how to determine exactly where to stand to place the moon on top of a natural or man-made landmark.  Here's a link to the event if you'd like to join us: http://goo.gl/DSXu8Z

In this example, I predicted where to catch the full moon during a lunar eclipse so its path would pass the tip of the Transamerica Building in San Francisco.  Using eclipse predictions, lunar elevation angle and compass direction, I used the height of the tower to predict how far away I'd need to stand and in what compass direction.  I mapped that point on Google Earth, showed up a little early to start shooting hundreds of photos to created the time-lapse sequence, and it turned out that I pretty much nailed it!  The center of the moon passed right across the tip of the tower.

New tools make this sort of planning easier than ever! We'll be demonstrating the PhotoPills app.  If you'd like to purchase the app to follow along on your smartphone as we show the features, follow this link to buy it: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photopills/id596026805?mt=8&uo=4&at=10ldnC

Here's a time-lapse video I created of the moon as it approached and passed the Transamerica Building:



This video was featured on Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog on Discover Magazine:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/12/12/lunar-eclipse-time-lapse/
Lunar eclipse time lapse : Bad Astronomy

Moon Over Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

Update August 2014: Thanks to the +Royal Observatory Greenwich in London for including my moon rise image in your video about the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2104 competition!

Read my 2012 blog post about my pursuit of this image:
Moon Rise over Half Dome in Yosemite

See my notes below for tutorial blog posts and a copy of the demonstration/tutorial video described in this post.  Here's the Royal Observatory's new video on the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition:



Here are some of my lunar photography and astronomical alignment examples for you to enjoy:

Moon and Sun, a set on Flickr.

I've been teaching people for years how to pursue lunar photography.  I wrote a blog post back in 2006 on anticipating shots like these: 

     Plan Ahead for Great Full Moon Rise and Set Shots!

That planning got even easier with the creation of apps like +The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE), as I describe in this 2011 update blog post:
     Put Sunset Full Moon Rise Dates on Your Calendar

These days in addition to +The Photographer's Ephemeris I also use +PhotoPills, StarWalk and Sky Safari+ to plan my shots:

• PhotoPills: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photopills/id596026805?mt=8&uo=4&at=10ldnC
• The Photographers Ephemeris: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-photographers-ephemeris/id366195670?mt=8&uo=4&at=10ldnC
• StarWalk:  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/star-walk-5-stars-astronomy/id295430577?mt=8&uo=4&at=10ldnC
• SkySafari 4+: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/skysafari-4-plus/id766939884?mt=8&uo=4&at=10ldnC

Here's our recorded broadcast of the +Landscape Photography Show, when the developers of the PhotoPills app were kind enough to join me to provide a tutorial demonstration for their software:

http://youtu.be/Wgb_r9JlKRM?list=PLlLN6Bdq3jrnAwmOOhU0TufC9XsjbEiK2


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