Photographer's Ephemeris Field Test

[BobH]

I recently posted a thread about The Photographer's Ephemeris and what a useful product it is. http://www.pnwphotos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=980

Tonight I decided to do a field test of the product. We had an incredible sunset last night, and the haze in the air tonight made it appear that there would be another nice one.

So, I decided to fire up the Ephemeris and see how it did...

My goal was a sunset shot on Puget Sound. I wanted to get as much water as possible in the shot.

[BobH]

I was able to quickly and easily find the right location. A few moments experimenting with the map and dragging the location around showed that Redondo and the Poverty Bay area was the right spot.

[BobH]

Here's one of the shots I took:

[BobH]

OK, so how accurate was The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE).

Well, let's see...

When I got home, I put the cursor on my exact location using the Satellite maps view. I was able to pinpoint it quite closely, within feet.

Let's be honest, I was very lucky on this one, not all areas have this kind of high resolution imagery. In fact, the more wild and scenic the area is, the less likely you'll have anything close to this detail.

However, that's not the program's fault. It depends on Google maps for the imagery. You'll get as much detail as Google maps provides. The topo maps are usually detailed enough to get you pretty close.

[BobH]

Once I had my location pinpointed, I zoomed out to see where the sun would align. The orange line showing sunset looked like it was barely missing a point on Vashon Island. Zooming in confirmed that it should be just a bit offshore.

[BobH]

Here's a 1:1 crop of one of my sunset images.

(Yeah, it's grainy and blown out, I was shooting directly into the sun, and this is a 100% crop. Ignore the image quality and look at the sun's position in relation to the island...)

Notice that the sun is pretty much exactly where TPE said it would be. I'm very impressed.