 If you note the position of the sun from the same location at the same time, every day throughout the year, you're going to notice that the sun makes an unusual path through the sky. This path, a lopsided figure age, is called an analemma. There are tons of great videos and websites explaining why the sun takes this peculiar path from our vantage point here on earth, and I'll link some of those in the description so you can read more about how earth's particular 23.5-degree tilt and elliptical orbit around the sun results in this interesting pattern that we see. This year, 2023, I am determined personally to capture the analemma in a year-long photograph. Now, the extreme way to do this that only a few people have ever done successfully is on film, using just one frame of film, rewinding after each shot and exposing multiple times. This was first done by Dennis D'Chico, who published his result in Sky and Telescope in 1979. I'm not quite ready to take on the film challenge yet, so I'm going to be using a digital SLR and composite all of the frames I take throughout the year in Photoshop, but I still will have to be super accurate with both timing, framing, and positioning to pull this shot off. It is quite the challenge still, and I'll admit that I've already attempted to do an analemma photo, and I gave up on my first attempt, but I did learn a lot from that. My biggest mistake in my first attempt is that I was setting up the tripod each time to take a photo with a ball head like this, and I just found it very difficult to pull off the precision needed in terms of positioning the camera in exactly the same way for every session. So my plan this time around is to actually stake the tripod into the ground and then not touch it other than to put the camera on. So I hope to leave something like this set up all year, and hopefully that will help a lot. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself because instead of trying to fit everything that I want to talk about with the analemma project into one video, I'm going to make this series. So you can follow along with me throughout the year of taking this photo, and I'll share everything that I'm learning along the way, and hopefully also get tips from you and inspire others to take on this analemma challenge with me. In this first video, what I'm going to cover is figuring out a suitable location to take the pictures from because the sun is going to move quite a lot throughout the year. So we need a good open patch of sky, preferably to the south or southeast or maybe southwest, that we can see the sun every day throughout the year. And to do that, we have to make sure that there's not going to be any obstructions like trees that will stop us from completing our analemma. But then we also ideally want to put some kind of foreground objects into the shot, trees or buildings or whatever, to make it more interesting and to give a sense of scale. So to plan this out, I'm going to show you how to bring your location into the free software Stellarium as a customized landscape, and this will allow us to visualize the analemma with the photos of the actual trees I'm surrounded by here. The first step is we need to take a series of photos that captures everything around this spot that we plan to use in a 360 degree circle. And I suggest taking these vertically, like this, with a wide angle lens. I'm using a 16 millimeter here. The important thing is that you include both the horizon line and the tops of the trees in your photos. If you don't have a wide enough lens to do that, you could, you know, do it two times around, changing the angle to capture all the photos you need. And if all of this with, you know, using your DSLR sounds like too much hassle, or you don't have a DSLR, you can also probably do this with your smartphone in panorama mode. And it might be even easier to do it that way. But we'll now head to the computer and keep going to create this customized landscape. In this video series, I'm going to be showing you the how to of capturing an analemma. But I think you will be well rewarded by understanding the physics and the math underlying this pattern in the sky, which is caused by Earth's particular tilt and our elliptical orbit around the sun, which is why I'm happy to have this video sponsored by Brilliant. Brilliant.org is a hands on way to learn science and math and computer science in a really fun and interactive way. There are thousands of lessons with new ones added each month. I've been currently working through the course called scientific thinking. And I'm really enjoying how engaging and relevant the examples are to things that an astrophotographer should understand, like gearing in our mountains. To get started for free, visit Brilliant.org slash Nebula Photos or click on the link in the description. The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription. Okay, I'm going to show how to now make these photos into a customized landscape in the program Stellarium. And I'm going to be showing it on my Mac, but I will link to a video from Martin's astrophotography that shows the Windows way of doing this. So if you're on Windows, I'd suggest watching his video instead for how to set up this custom landscape. But on Mac, the way to do it is I've just taken the SD card out of my camera. And then I'll you would just transfer the files from the SD card onto my computer. I've already made a folder here and transferred them. And then you can just use whatever software you like for making the panorama. So for stitching together the photographs, you can do it in Photoshop. There's also a free program called Huggin, H-U-G-I-N that works pretty well. But I've gravitated over the years to this PT GUI. It is a paid program, but I'll show you what I like about it. And you know, don't get this unless you think you're going to be doing a lot of panoramas. But this panorama editor is very nice. It allows me to quickly change, you know, what direction I'm pointing while keeping to this sort of rectilinear projection. The way to set up your panorama, if you have this ability, if not, don't worry about it because we can change it later, is to make east on the far left edge. And so it will go east, south, west, north, and then back to east. If you don't have a program that you can change sort of what direction you're pointing in your panorama, don't worry about it. It's really, we can change it later actually just through the text editor. Okay. And then what I want to do is make sure the horizon line is exactly at 50% up and down vertically. So I have my rulers on here, you can turn them off and on with command R. For my top ruler, I'm just going to drag down a guide until I'm at 50%. And you can see right now the image is below that horizon line. I want to match up the horizon line with this guide. So I'm just going to choose the move tool and drag up the image until the horizon line matches the guide. Okay. And then I'm done with the guide. Next thing I'm going to do is I want to delete the sky so that we're just left with the landscape. So to do that in Photoshop, I can just do select sky and press the delete key. And you can see now the sky is this checkerboard pattern. If there's a little bit of stuff left in here, it's really not a big deal. I mean, if you want to go in and use the eraser and erase some of that, you can. But I'm just going to leave it because it really doesn't matter that much because I wouldn't be shooting down here in the trees anyways. And this did a good enough job so that we can clearly see the obstructions of these trees in Photoshop. Okay. And then optionally, I could just fill this area down here. So let's just make a big selection on it and fill it with the foreground color, which is this nice blue. Okay. And then that's it. That's all we have to do to make this sort of custom picture. We've gotten rid of the sky. We've made sure the horizon line is right at 50%. Optionally, but it is nice if you put east right on this left edge, and then it goes east, south, west, north, back to east. That's the direction that Photoshop expects for the picture. I mean, that Stellarium expects for the picture, but we can always change that, like I said. Okay. So now let's go ahead and go to File, Export, Save for Web. I'm going to save it as a PNG-24 and want to make sure that transparency box is checked and then click Save. And I'll save it as Anilemma.png. Save it to the desktop. Okay. And now, so I have this Anilemma.png on my desktop. Next thing we're going to do is open up TextEdit. Make a new document. If your TextEdit doesn't look like mine, go into the Preferences and change it from rich text to plain text. Even after changing that, you might not see a difference, but then if you don't, just make a new document and it'll open up as a plain text document. Okay. And then there's two headings that you should put in brackets like this, Landscape and Location. Under Landscape, you should have the name of your customized landscape. So I'm going with Anilemma 2023. The author, that's me, description. You can just put a short description in. This one is important where it says MapTextEquals. This has to exactly equal the name that you picked over here. So I picked Anilemma.png. So that's what it should say. Type. Let's go with Spherical. Don't know if that's right, but I think it'll work. This one is important to angle. Rotate Z equals zero. So if I got this perfect and east is exactly along the left edge, we can just leave this at zero and it should work. But I'm guessing I maybe didn't get it quite perfect, so we might have to play around with this value a little bit to get everything lined up in Stellarium. But we'll do that after. Then make a new heading in brackets, Location, Planet, Earth. I've blurred out my location data here, but you put in your latitude, longitude, altitude. And if you want, you can put in a light pollution, mortal scale level that just will change how Stellarium acts with your landscape activated in terms of how much it'll show the Milky Way and stuff like that. Then we want to save this. So I'm going to do Command S, save it to the desktop. And we'll save it as this is very important. Landscape.ini. And it has to look exactly like that. Uncheck this little box. It says if no extension, use text. Just make sure it says landscape.ini, nothing else. And click Save to the desktop. And if it worked correctly, you should see this icon, meaning that it doesn't recognize what kind of file this is. Almost there. Now we're going to put both of these into a folder. So just select them and choose New Folder. Call it Anilemma 2023. And we are going to make a zipped version of that folder by right clicking and choosing Compress. Okay, now we're ready to open up Stellarium. And we go over to the left hand side here, choose Sky and Viewing Options Window. Click on Landscapes up here at the top. You can see these are just the default landscapes. We want to go down here to where it says Add, Remove. And install a new landscape from a zip archive. Go to the desktop. Choose this zip that we just made. Click Open. And it should say Landscape Anilemma 2023 or whatever you named it has been installed successfully. If you get there is no Stellarium landscape here, then it's probably something with file endings or something like that. Just double check everything. Make sure that it's just Landscape.ini in the folder and that the Landscape.ini is linking to that PNG that you made. So you can see there's a little bit of fringing on the trees but not too bad. Gives us a pretty good idea here. Okay, so North is saying North is there. North is actually right above this this taller tree right here. So we're about I'd say 15 or 20 degrees off. Let's make sure exactly what it is by turning on Markings as a Muthal Grid. Okay. And I can see right there that's where North should be is at plus 20 degrees. So if I want to move North 20 degrees this way I'm actually going to put in minus 20 into our .ini file. So I'm going to quit out of Stellarium. And we don't want to edit this one Landscape.ini on our desktop because that's not actually where Stellarium is grabbing the information from. It put it in its own folder structure and I'll show you how to get there. On Mac you hold down the option key and then up here with finder open click go. You should see library. If you're holding down the option key click on library. Now you can let go of option. Go into application support. Go down to Stellarium. Go to Landscapes and then you should see your custom Landscape right there. We'll open up the Landscape.ini file with text edit again. And I'm just going to change that angle rotate Z option to negative 20 and save. X out of that. Open back up Stellarium. Okay it went back to the default Landscape because we haven't set ours as the default yet. But if I turn on Analema 2023 now. Now North is exactly where I want it. Let me just double check by going back in time a little bit. Yep. Okay so see now North is exactly lined up with this tree where I know North is because I've seen the Polaris directly over this tree many times. And so now we are all set up here and this is all correct. This is south right here. So how do we now start visualizing the Analema? So a couple things. First we want to pick the day that we're sort of planning to start the Analema. So let's say I'm planning to start it in a week. So I'll just go to the 23rd here. And then I can just click on this hour to see where the sun is going to be at different times. So I can see that I could either start this project maybe at 1030 or 1130 looks pretty good. But by 1230 the sun is behind that tree there. So let's try 1130. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to step through the months. You zoom back out a little bit here. Okay I'm just going to step through the months. So here's February. You can see the sun goes up a little bit to the left. There's March and it now goes up quite a bit and way to the left. There is April. It's now sort of starting to round the figure eight. There's May. It goes up some more. June. And now it's sort of rounding out the top of the part of the figure eight. It's July, August and now it's coming back down this way. September, October, November. That's pretty close to that tree. Let's see what it does in December. December. Okay so it's rounding back this way. Now let's say I was just a little bit off with this Stellarium landscape then I would be in the tree. So I'm going to now try a different time and see if I have a little bit more safety. So let's try 11 a.m. at all of those months. So here's November, December, September, August, July, June. Okay so it looks like 11 a.m. is going to be safe right? It's just tracing out that figure eight. So the next thing to figure out here is what lens I would want to use to make this. So for that we go up here to this little image sensor option and I want a full frame and I want a photo lens that is wide angle. So let's try 24 millimeters first. Okay so 24 millimeters. If I put it like this let's see what happens. We're outside of the frame but maybe I want to do this with a vertical composition. So you can see right now the rotation angle is set to zero but if I click on this little wrench in sensors I can change the rotation angle to 90 and let's see what we can do with that. So this is still with a 24 millimeter lens and then I'm just going to step through the months again. Okay and this looks more promising definitely. Okay but hopefully this has been useful for showing you how to trace the sun's analemma in Stellarium. Get your customized landscape in here so you're not running into the trees and then start calculating what kind of equipment you'll need. Like you know what if you're on full frame it looks like a 24 millimeter lens will work well so that you can start planning out your project. Like I said this is going to be a series so in the next one I'll be talking a lot more about equipment and securing the tripod and using solar filters and all of that. So you're now seeing the names of everyone who supports this YouTube channel over on patreon.com slash nebula photos. It's an excellent community of dedicated amateur astrophotographers just people who want to learn and are very willing to share their own expertise. We have over 800 members now. There's an active discord that you can get involved in and I can't thank my patreon members enough because I'm now doing this full-time thanks to all of you and it is what has allowed me to make these videos and to really pursue this as my own business. So thank you so much to all my current patreon members and if you enjoy this channel I think you will get a lot of benefit out of joining my patreon community. It starts at just one dollar a month and for that you get a bunch of perks including direct messaging support with me, a monthly zoom chat with the whole community, a monthly imaging challenge organized on discord where we pick different targets every month and a whole lot more. So if interested head over to patreon.com slash nebula photos. Till next time this has been Nico Carver, Clear Skies.