Sky & Telescope - June 2021 - 63

W READY FOR A SHOOT
Author Marybeth Kiczenski
heads out for a night of deepscape photography.

and Star-trails. The view will
return to the overhead map
view. Touch the name of a
star at the top of the screen,
and you can change the
listing from Major Star to
Constellations and activate
the constellations you'd like
displayed. After that, touch
the bracketed box on the
lower right of the screen and
select Viewﬁnder (VR). You
should now see the major constellations, which will help you
pinpoint where your subject will be in relation to the horizon.
You can zoom in by spreading apart two ﬁngers on the screen
- this changes the focal length setting. The app also will load
elevation maps, so you can see if there's a tall hill or mountain in the way (not a problem in Michigan).
Once you're comfortable with the scene, continue to
adjust the time setting to pinpoint the period with the best
alignment between your target and foreground. Be sure to
save your plan, as you'll need it to open it again when at your
chosen location.

Executing the Plan
Now you can head out to take your photos. Be sure to leave
plenty of time, because you'll need to perform an additional
action with PlanIt Pro to nail your composition once you
arrive on location.
Once onsite, open your saved plan to ﬁ nd your predetermined shooting spot (the app uses GPS to show you exactly
where you are compared to your pinned location). Next,
click on the bracketed box again and select Viewﬁnder (AR).
This is the " augmented reality " function of the app, which
ﬁ rst requires you to snap a picture in the direction of your
composition. This will be overlaid on the view so you can
reﬁ ne the plan of when your target will be in the exact spot
for your image. Follow the app's instructions to take the
foreground image.
With the location shot in the app, simply scrub through
the time and check the constellations that are projected into
the view. Do they still line up as in your original plan using
the Viewﬁnder (VR) setting? If so, then you're good to go! If
not, you may have to adjust your location slightly.
When you're satisﬁed with the view, set up your equipment, polar align your star tracker, and wait for the big
moment. For NEOWISE, I ﬁred off six 2-minute, tracked
photos as the comet moved between the bridge's towers. Seeing that icy snowball show up on the camera's viewscreen
was nothing short of amazing! After recording the tracked
exposures, I turned the drive off and took a few stationary
images of the bridge. This particular
night was quite windy, so I took several frames to ensure at least one was
acceptably sharp.

Putting It All Together

SNAP AWAY Once all the pieces of your
plan are in place, the camera can be left
to do its work until it's time to stop the
tracker and record the foreground image.

Once you're back home with all your
photos, you can load them into your
computer and combine them into
your composition. In my workﬂow
I utilize a few programs, including
Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop,
plus PixInsight for image stacking.
I begin by opening all the RAW
images in Lightroom, where I perform
initial adjustments, such as white
balance, some exposure adjustments,
and matching the color casts between
each exposure as closely as possible so
that they blend well. I then save each
image as a 16-bit TIF ﬁle.
Next, I'll move on to the foreground picture. I process this in
Lightroom the same way as with the
tracked images, but depending on
the lighting I may use a single shot
or stack a few images to reduce noise
in underexposed areas. In the case
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Sky & Telescope - June 2021

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