Comment by lanthade
20 days ago
Interesting tool, would probably be super useful if I had more knowledge of the things floating around out there. I'm usually just concerned with photographing the galactic core on dark nights. I didn't have enough domain knowledge to figure that out with this tool though. I use PhotoPils on my iOS devices for astrophotography planning and that works great for my limited level of knowledge.
Don’t let lack of familiarity keep you from exploring. More and more tools/apps are available like TFA that lets you find things without knowing about them before hand. There’s no better way to learn than diving into the new to you object you just images all night. Don’t let some one tell you that you have to know an object intimately before imaging. How you progress through your journey in astronomy is up to you. Keep looking up!
The funny thing is that I personally have ended up creating a "large" google sheet with all the Messier objects which my rig could image, and added a column for "when" to image (i.e., spring, etc). It's served me quite well.
As I said in another comment, a true killer feature would be to image my yard, with all the obstacles blocking the sky, and intersecting the available sky space with the trajectories of those objects, and use that info to actually tell me what I can image.
You don't need to image your yard. That would be pretty overkill and would limit the use of the app from allowing its use if you took your gear to a new location.
Instead, you should just figure out what the degrees of the top of your blocking items are and set that as a limit. If the tops of trees mean something needs to be at least 30° above the horizon, then use that value. If your neighbor's house means it needs to be 60°, then use that value. Being allowed to say 30° to the east, 60° to the west, etc would be even better. Imaging your yard and having to decipher all of that would be way overkill and totally unnecessary.