Finding our star and our moon seem simple until you try to plan a photography session in which the position of either the sun or the moon is important. Then it becomes a lot more confusing. The sun is relatively constant. It appears to rise in the east and set in the west at more or less predictable times. The moon is another story because it almost seems to be playing hide-and-seek with us. I'm usually up early, so I occasionally get to see the moon race across the pre-dawn sky and dodge behind the horizon just before the sun rises. Can someone explain this madness?
I have good news: You don't have to be an astronomer to figure it out. What you need is Sun and Moon Calculator from Douglas Software. This is a program I mentioned earlier this month when I received a news release about the program, so I talked with Douglas Green and he sent me a copy of the program.
You can download a free trial version of the application, but it won't do you much good unless you live near Gisborne, New Zealand; Hobart, Tasmania; Roswell, New Mexico; Whitehorse, Yukon; or Winchester, Hampsire. The free trial is enough to let you see how the program works. To see how it works in your location, you'll need the paid version. It's a $40 application and that may seem like a lot, but if you need to know where you'll find the sun or the moon a month from now, it's a lot less expensive and time consuming that earning a degree in celestial mechanics.
Green offers several other applications for photographers, including ones that calculate depth of field and the hyper-focal distance. For now we'll stick with Sun and Moon Calculator.
Determining where the sun and moon will be in the sky depends on knowing where you are. A link to Google Maps will help you define the exact latitude and longitude that will be needed by the program if your current location isn't in the program's database. You'll also want to know the altitude of your location. Google Maps can provide latitude and longitude. Search will provide information about your location's altitude.
Sun and Moon Calculator automatically calculates your location's magnetic variation. If you'd like to double-check, you can use the NOAA website. North hasn't always been north. That's one of the fun aspects of being on a living planet. Things change, sometimes unpredictably.
You'll also need to know how your time zone relates to Greenwich Mean Time (also known as Zulu), but this is also easy to find on sites such as Time and Date.
For Worthington, I know that I'm at approximately 83 degrees 1 minute west longitude, 40 degrees 5 minutes north latitude, with a magnetic variation of 7 degrees 1.6 minutes west and an altitude of about 263 meters. Because it's summer and Daylight Saving Time is in effect, the 5-hour difference from GMT needs to be adjusted by 1 hour.
Click any of the smaller images for a full-size view.
Press Esc to dismiss the larger image.
Having provided that information, I might wonder when I could obtain a good photograph of a full moon. The calculator has 3 tabs: Sun, Moon, and Horizon. On September 4, we had a half moon, so I advanced the display to the 28th of September, when a full moon would be near the horizon (and therefore large) about 7am.
But wait! At 7am, the sun will have started to rise. Maybe an earlier time would be better. This is a time when the moon is rapidly sinking in the sky, from about 25 degrees at 5:30 to 9 degrees at 7. The lower the moon is, the better because the atmosphere acts as a gigantic magnifying glass. But still I want to create the photo before the sun begins to rise and that would suggest 6 or 6:30. The moon will still be relatively low on the horizon then.
The third tab represents the horizon so at 5am the moon is relatively low and the sun isn't yet visible.
At 6, the moon is lower and the sun isn't yet visible. This is probably the best time to choose.
By 7, the moon is near the horizon and the sky is beginning to lighten. This could still represent a good time for a photograph.
By 8, the moon will be at or below the horizon and the sun will be visible.
The one thing that Sun and Moon Calculator can't help with is the weather. It can tell you exactly where the sun and the moon will be in the sky, but it can't tell you whether you'll be able to see the sky. For that you'll need the National Weather Service or a service such as Weather Underground in the United States or a similar weather forecasting service in any other country.
The help file provides lots of useful information, including an explanation of magnetic variation. North on a compass is magnetic north, but true north may differ by several degrees. Magnetic variation uses the World Magnetic Model, which is the generally agreed standard by which the differences are calculated. According to the help file, it's "a product of the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The U.S. National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) and the British Geological Survey (BGS) produced the WMM with funding provided by NGA in the USA and by the Defence Geographic Imagery and Intelligence Agency (DGIA) in the UK."
The help file also includes photography tutorials that cover topics such as how to photograph an eclipse, easy tips for shooting the moon, the basics of better moon photography, and escaping the sunrise and sunset cliché. One of the more common mistakes amateur photographers make when photographing the moon is allowing the camera to choose the exposure. This will always result in a disastrously overexposed moon. The moon is usually considered to be relatively dark, but it's not.
On earth, a good general rule for photographing an object that's in direct sunlight is to set the camera's f/stop at 11. For color slides, the recommendation is 16 and that's probably the better choice for digital cameras. Then set the shutter speed to the inverse of the ISO speed of the sensor. So if your camera's sensor is set at ISO 100, the proper exposure at f/11 (or f/16) will be 1/100th of a second. If you want to photograph the light from stars, you'll need a much longer exposure because they're so far away and that's probably what confuses people. The inverse square law illustrates why this is so.
For objects on earth or near to earth, the the inverse square law is a critical consideration. The law states that the intensity of light decreases with the square of the distance from the source of the light. This, by the way, is why on-camera flash creates such contrasty light and why it's not of much use beyond a dozen feet or so. By contrast, our primary light source, the sun, is 93 million miles from the earth. The moon, depending on its location, might be 250,000 miles closer to or further from the sun. Stated in millions of miles, that 0.250 million and so it's clear that 0.250 when compared to 93 doesn't amount to much. Essentially, the moon receives the same illumination that a flower on the surface of the planet earth receives and thus needs the same exposure.
If you install Sun and Moon Calculator on a desktop system at home or in your office, you might also want to have a copy on a notebook computer that you carry when you're away from the desktop. The program is installed and licensed on a per-computer basis, but you can install it on more than one computer. According to Douglas Green, "We would need to know the buyer's name and the 8-digit serial number for the new system." Once you've provided that, you'll receive an activation code for the second computer.
Instead of playing hide-and-seek with the sun and moon, know where they'll be.Sun and Moon Calculator provides the information you need to predict the location of the sun and moon, individually or in conjunction with each other. Initially I took the program's relatively high price ($40) into consideration and set the rating at 4 cats, which is still a very respectable rating. Then, after reviewing the help file and the tutorials, a full 5-cat rating seemed appropriate.
Additional details are available on the Douglas Software website.
This week Microsoft released another version of Windows 10 in the Fast Ring. Build 10547 includes bug fixes and improvements over Build 10532. There are also some new features.
Start has been modified: The default for tile groups on Start is 3 columns of medium tiles, but that's an odd number (both literally and figuratively) because a lot of people wanted a 4th column that makes it easier to have 2 wide or large tiles side by side in a group. Three columns is still the default, but the wider mode can be enabled in Settings > Personalization > Start where you select "Show more tiles".
This is currently only in the preview build, where the number of possible tiles has been expanded from 512 tiles to 2048. Assuming the changes are popular, you'll see them in an upcoming release.
Lots of apps have been updated. For example, the Photos app now has a folder view that lets users see OneDrive and PC folders. The Xbox app has also been updated, as have Groove, Mail, Calendar, and Maps.
If you don't like the Windows background picture on the sign-in screen, you can turn it off in Settings > Personalization > Lock screen. There you can deselect the option to "Show Windows background picture on the sign-in screen."
Underlying causes of a critical error dialog Insiders were seeing with Start has been fixed and Search (which I grumbled about last week) should work more consistently now when interacting with Start.
A bug that caused the Action Center icon light up even though there weren't any new notifications has been fixed.
Users will be able to use Cortana without converting a local account to a connected MSA account, but that's coming in a future build even though it was supposed to be in this one.
Microsoft says several issues with audio -- including issues specific to Realtek audio devices -- have been fixed.
Keep in mind, though, that these changes won't be generally available for a while and are currently available only in the Insiders Fast Ring.
This week Microsoft released Office 2016 as the company moves along the line of providing Office as a service. I had installed a pre-release version of the applications on a test machine a few months ago and it looked a lot like MS (more of the same). After all, how much change can there be in programs that create documents and financial reports?
Here's Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's take on it: "The way people work has changed dramatically, and that's why Microsoft is focused on reinventing productivity and business processes for the mobile-first, cloud-first world." Nadella noted that the new version takes "another big step forward in transforming Office from a familiar set of individual productivity apps to a connected set of apps and services designed for modern working, collaboration and teamwork."
Yes, that's new. And for people who have never been able to figure out how Help works, the Office 2016 ribbons have a clickable link called "Tell me what you want to do."
Microsoft Vice President for the Office Client Applications and Services Team, Kirk Koenigsbauer, says that Office 2016 delivers new versions of the Office desktop programs for Windows. That includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Visio, and Access. Those who subscribe to Office 365 will find that the programs are updated constantly (the Adobe model). The subscription includes OneDrive on-line storage, Skype for Business, Delve, Yammer, and additional security features.
New data-loss prevention components are in place in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook to reduce the risk of leaking sensitive data and the availability of multi-factor authentication secures access to content.
Not all the pieces are currently in place, though. Enterprise Data Protection will be available for the Office Mobile apps for Windows 10 later this year and for the desktop programs early next year.
Maybe the problem was all those people trying to call stores to reserve copies of Office 2016. Whatever the cause, Skype blacked out on Monday and users around the world found that they couldn't log on to the service or make Skype calls.
Increasingly, Skype is becoming an important part of business because it offers low cost calls with high fidelity. That's why I use Skype whenever possible for interviews. It's why news services such as NPR use it, particularly when communicating with reporters in countries where phone service might be monitored or interrupted.
Skype has 300 million users worldwide and starting late Sunday night in the United States, the service was unavailable. The outage also affected users in Japan and much of Europe.
Microsoft declined to specify how many users were unable to access the service or what caused the problem, other than to characterize it as a technical problem. In some cases, users could log on, but were unable to make calls. The Skype chat function still worked, though.
For some users, the outage lasted more than 12 hours.
One of my favorite Windows 10 features isn't turned on by default. When you hover the mouse cursor over a window and use the scroll wheel, shouldn't the operating system realize that you want to scroll that window even if another window is active? In Windows 10, you can enable this function.
On the Mouse and Touchpad panel in Settings, you can turn the feature on. This is such a common-sense feature that I'm surprised it became available only in Windows 10, and then only if you change the default operation. How often are you working in one window but need to change what's visible in another window? This is something that I do frequently, as in many times a day. In the past, I had to click the window that I wanted to scroll, scroll to the location I needed to review, click in the window where I'm working, reposition the cursor because the click placed the cursor where I didn't want it, and then continue working.
With this feature enabled in Windows 10, all I have to do is hover over the window I want to scroll, use the wheel to reposition the contents of the window, and then continue with what I was working on.
If you're still using Windows 7 or Windows 8, you can add this feature by installing WizMouse. I still work with a Windows 7 computer every day and WizMouse helps me to maintain my remaining bits of sanity. Check it out on the WizMouse website. There are some problems if you have a Logitech mouse, though. One that I've seen on a Windows 7 system eliminates scrolling altogether in some applications.
