 This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Hey, welcome back. I'm Nico, and this is part four in my series on preparing for photographing the April 8th, 2024, total solar eclipse. This video is going to build on the last part, part three, but we're going to add an additional wrinkle here, which is a tracker, also known as a star tracker. Although in this case, of course, we're gonna be tracking our local star, the sun. And it does, most trackers have some kind of built-in solar tracking rate, which this one does. And another one I'll show you in a second. Either you have one or maybe you can buy one quickly. You really need to start practicing now with this. And there are a few advantages to using a tracker over just having the camera and lens on a tripod. Basically, this is gonna keep the sun roughly centered in your field of view for the whole eclipse. If you're not tracking, then you have to manually keep moving the sun back into your camera's screen here. Because the sun is going to, of course, keep moving due to the Earth's rotation, so we just have to keep re-centering it. The exception to that is if you're using a very wide-angle lens where the whole eclipse event fits into the field of view. But assuming you want a more zoomed-in view with a telephoto lens like this one, that's the big advantage to a star tracker, is not having to manually keep the sun centered because this device does it for you. A smaller advantage, but it may be important to you, is you can take much longer exposures with a tracker without any blurring from the Earth's rotation. And this allows for the capture of some rarer phenomenon during totality, like earth shine. And earth shine is the little bit of light reflected off the Earth and back onto the lunar surface. And to capture it, you're gonna need a long exposure, so long that you'll completely blow out the corona, as you can see here. But I think it's pretty cool, even though it's noisy due to there being so little light actually hitting the moon from the reflected light off from the Earth. An advanced topic I'll get into later, in a later video maybe, is that you can use HDR high-dynamic range techniques to combine your earth shine photo with your other corona photos to get something like this image. Another reason for long exposures during totality, where you might want tracking, is to capture the stars that are visible during totality. And this year, we also have the chance to capture a fairly bright comet during totality, or we think it might be bright, P12 Ponds Brooks, which will be about 25 degrees away from the eclipsed sun. And I'll talk more about the comet towards the end of the video, and show how to plan for it if you're interested. Okay, so let's get into it. I'm gonna skip over calculating exposure lengths and things like that, since I just talked about that in the last one very recently, so you can go and watch part three to see that. You'd be using the same exposure calculator for a setup with a tracker. One thing that I should have mentioned in the last part that I forgot is that I shoot raw on my DSLR or mirrorless camera, and I process all my photos with Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop. And shooting raw and processing them that way gives you plenty of latitude when it comes to exposure. If you're a little bit overexposed or underexposed, for example, with raw processing, it's really not a big deal. You can just bring the exposure slider one way or the other, and it's gonna look great. You can shoot JPEG only and try to get everything perfect in camera without any editing, but it just requires a little bit more work and testing to make sure that the suggested exposure lengths from the online calculator are accurate to get a good exposure with your particular lens and solar filter and camera. And so you might have to adjust that shutter speed up or down a little bit to make sure that you have the perfect exposure. And one more thing I forgot to say in the last part is that, and this is even more relevant here now that we have the tracker, is that if you're using anything that uses batteries, which you will be if you're using anything digital, you need to bring spare batteries. And I'd suggest starting with fresh batteries and then also, of course, just be cognizant of your battery level, change out the batteries well ahead of time because the last thing you need is to try changing a battery last minute right before totality starts or even worse to lose power during totality because the battery dies. Many trackers have two ways to power them, either internal AA's or connecting an external battery. If yours is like that, then I'd suggest having both options available, just in case maybe start with the external battery and then it can always fall over to the internal batteries. Okay, so that's that and we can now get on with the procedure with a tracker. And the first thing we're gonna have to do with a tracker like this is polar align it. Now, if you can get to your desired eclipse location the night on the path of totality the night before and leave your tracker out overnight safely, the most accurate way to polar align is gonna be with the polar scope right here, the polar scope built into the tracker and using the star Polaris at night. And you just put the star in the right spot on the reticule on your polar scope and many of you have done this before if your nighttime asked to photographers but I'm sure many of you are also not gonna be able to get to the spot you're shooting from the night before. So our next best option is daytime polar alignment. And daytime polar alignment is definitely good enough for solar tracking for this purpose. In 2017, I went pretty old school with my daytime polar alignment and just use shadows, string and a compass and some information on the magnetic declination for that particular location. Nowadays, since most of us are carrying smart devices, a smartphone, I'd suggest a smartphone based method for this and it's available on both iPhone and Android. They're very similar. They just use different apps. Now, no matter what kind of phone you have if you use a case with a magnet on it you need to remove that case. The reason I have this case with a magnet on it is it's easy to stick on my little adapter when driving but I wanna remove this case. I'm planning on maybe getting an alternate case right before the eclipse but for now just for demonstration I'll just go caseless with my phones and be careful. And the reason is this magnet will totally mess up your phone's internal compass which is what we need to be accurate for this method of daytime alignment to work. Okay, so the next step is we wanna calibrate that compass which you do on any phone just by moving your phone in a figure eight pattern through the air with the Compass app open and that calibrates the compass. And then next we need to attach the phone securely or semi securely in such a way that this part of the phone the top of the phone is pointing north. And what I suggest for this is to make something out of wood like this just scrap wood is fine and attach it to the tracker or mount and then rubber band the phone to the wood. On iPhone we're gonna buy the PS Align Pro app for $3 and follow its daytime polar alignment routine which is quite detailed. On Android we're gonna buy Polar Aligner Pro app for 350 and follow its beta daytime alignment routine which when it comes down to it is very similar. These are by different developers so they have a different look but it's really the exact same concept which is just to use your phone's compass and then use the Altitude and Azimuth knobs on your wedge here to get the mount polar aligned by putting this little dot right in the center of the crosshairs. I just tried this with both phones and they agreed perfectly. So I think this is gonna be a really good method for tracking the sun. And thanks for everyone who has mentioned it to me because it's a lot easier I think for most people than the string and shadow method. Okay, so once you're polar aligned with your tracker you wanna be very sure not to bump your mount. On a tripod like this it's very easy to just bump into the tripod and then you're out of polar alignment and have to redo the whole thing. It has to stay stable. The next thing we have to do is find the sun, point our lens at it and with the filter on of course and turn on solar tracking on the mount. If you're using a normal Star Tracker like this, the Star Adventurer 2i, you would do this completely manually by just loosening the clutches here and turning the camera until it's pointed at the sun. You can use a solar finder of course and then once you've found the sun you just tighten back up the clutches. And then once you've centered the sun on screen like that you then just turn this little dial on the side to the sun symbol and that will turn on solar tracking and now the sun should stay centered. If it doesn't stay centered, if it starts to drift you might just have to fine tune your polar alignment a little bit and you just fine tune it until the sun does stay centered. So it's a good idea if it's a nice clear day on eclipse day to start doing this well ahead of time, way before C1 before the partial eclipse starts. Okay, I've switched out to a go-to mount here to make some points about go-to mounts and the GTI specifically. This is the Star Adventure GTI. There's a little bit more complexity here to think about. The first thing is that the GTI with the Sinscan Pro app has a sun safety feature built in. You're gonna have to bypass that to even go to the sun. It's here, the bypass is here under the settings to advanced feature and you just have to turn on observed sun. It does make you answer a math question to turn it on. The point of all of this is that they wanna make sure that you know to put a proper solar filter on before pointing your telescope at the sun. We know that so we're good to go. We can turn on observed sun. Now, just because this has go-to doesn't mean that it's going to put the sun right on screen. It will get it close but you will probably still need a solar finder to fine tune it because in the nighttime we can calibrate the go-to system on the GTI here with Star Alignment. We can't do that during the daytime unless we get there the night before and do it. Okay, so anyways, you're gonna have to use a solar finder. You find the sun. You turn on solar tracking here in the app and then it's very similar to the other track or the two I but with one important exception which is by default the GTI will do an auto meridian flip five degrees past the meridian. And guess what? At my location that would mean it would auto flip from one side to the other during totality, which would be a complete disaster, right? You would probably miss most of totality if that happened. So we have two options and the better option will depend on where you are along the path. For me, the best option is to flip before totality. And the reason for this is I have about 12 minutes to just manually go to the sun before totality and it will flip to the other side, right? And then so I'll re-slew, I'll center the sun, I'll get everything set up and then I'll still have a few minutes before totality starts. At other locations, the timing may be different and it might make more sense to slew to the other side after totality or just turn off the auto flip entirely and just let it track a little bit past the meridian. Now the GTI will only track so far past the meridian before it has a hard stop. I think it's about 15 degrees it looks like. So you will have to flip at that point. You can turn off the meridian flip with most go-to apps. You know, if you're using a Sinscan app and not all mounts is it really even necessary to flip, right? With the GTI, like I mentioned at 15 degrees, there's a hard stop but other mounts can just keep going and as long as your camera isn't hitting anything on the tripod, you might be good to go. Do you just keep tracking past the meridian all throughout the eclipse? It will just look sort of funny because your counterweight will be up above your telescope. But the important thing with any of this is be very aware of it. Be aware when the sun is going to cross the meridian for your location and have a game plan so that you're not gonna get into the situation where it's your mount is auto flipping the telescope or lens or whatever you have during totality or right before totality. Okay, and then as promised here at the end I'll comment a bit about the possibility of capturing a comet during totality, specifically the comet 12 P Pons Brooks and it's going to be about 25 degrees away from the eclipse sun. 12 P Pons Brooks has an orbital period of 70 years. So it's been seen before observed before in 1884 and 1954 and now we have it again in 2024. I've already been able to get a quick snapshot of it. It looked like this at 350 millimeter focal length and I'll be trying to capture a better shot of it during the new moon period in March. But it's a little bit tricky because it's one of those comets that's only visible right now at dusk and dawn and pretty low in the sky close to the horizon at least at my location. Except of course during the eclipse it will actually be high in the sky, right? Up by the sun. And the big question is will the comet be bright enough to see or to get a good photograph of it during totality? And the truth is no one knows for sure. Comets are unpredictable in their brightness but if you wanna try to photograph it I think the coolest shot would be fairly wide to get both totality, the eclipse itself and the comet in the same shot. Now that comes with some risks because it's a wide shot so the comet might not be big and bright enough to be visible in a wide angle shot. But if you wanna try, let's look at Stellarium to get some ideas of where it will be in the sky and what field of view would work. Okay, here we are in Stellarium. This is a free program you can download for this kind of thing. The first thing we have to do is actually add the comet to Stellarium's database because it's not in there by default. This is a little convoluted but should be fairly easy to follow me here. You're gonna go over here to the left hand side, click on configuration window, click on plugins. On the left hand side of plugins find solar system editor, then click configure. Then click solar system here, solar system tab. Then down here click on import orbital elements. Then choose comets. And then where it says select bookmark, click the little down arrow here and choose Gideon Van Butenin comets and click get orbital elements. Okay, then it's gonna come up with this really long list of comets. Luckily this is searchable so I'm gonna type in 12p and there's our comet right there. 12p Pons Brooks, we can check it and click add objects. And now you might have to restart Stellarium but it should be searchable now. If we open the search window and search, you should be able to now search for it and it will have its orbital elements for any day, any location on Earth. So now let's get us to eclipse time. So you wanna put in your location, we're close to where you're gonna be. Then open the date time window and let's go to April 8th at 140. There's the eclipse, right? And here's the meridian line. There's Jupiter and Venus. And what we wanna do is we wanna visualize well what kind of lens would work to get both the eclipse and the comet in the same shot? I mean, you don't have to do this. You could also just go after the comet. You have its RA and DEC right here. So you could just put those in to your telescope mount and slew to the comet during totality and try to take a picture of it more up close. That might be fun. But I'm gonna try this wide angle shot idea. It might not work, but I think it's worth a shot. So to visualize that, what you can do is go up here to what is this called? The ocular plugin and choose an image sensor. So I'm using a full frame camera here. And if you're not using one of these photo lens, 24 millimeter, 35 millimeter, you can also put in your own. So I looked at 35 and 50 and thought, you know what? I think I really wanna go with 40 and I have this really nice Sigma Art 40 millimeter lens. And then I can just try to frame up here. And you can see that if I get this framed up correctly, I'll be able to get Venus, the eclipse, the comet and Jupiter all in the same frame. And I think that might look pretty neat. And if I do get a good image, I would feature it on my personal website, which brings us to today's sponsor, which is Squarespace. I use Squarespace for my personal portfolio at NicoCarver.com because Squarespace makes it truly easy due to their website builder and their professional templates to really allow my portfolio to shine. There's a template for any kind of website you'd wanna make, but then of course, you can customize your website and Squarespace has a fluid engine. So these designs look great on mobile devices as well as desktops. I've also found Squarespace takes the hassle out of managing a website. There's no more fiddling with CSS for hours just to get something to look right. And there are a huge amount of included features to Squarespace, like if you need an online store that's built right in. So if you're looking for any kind of website, whether it be a portfolio of your photographs or a site for your business, I think you're gonna love Squarespace. You can get a free trial today at Squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch, use Squarespace.com slash Nebula Photos for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This has been Nico Carver at Nebula Photos. Clear skies, everyone.