My friend Alfred spent a year in Phoenix for a neurovascular fellowship, and we flew down to visit him.Sedona is a strange, strange place. It's clearly in an area that if history had gone otherwise would probably have been a national park, or at least a national monument. As it is, it remains a heavily developed town in the midst of some incredible scenery. It's largely a resort town of the spa-and-pool variety, but there's also a strong New Age component to the culture. If the signage in town is to be believed, you go to Sedona to access "vortex energy" and commune with aliens.
Of course, we went in part to commune with night landscape photography. I've started to use an Android app called PlanIt! in order to figure out where to stand, and what we'd be able to see. Here is the app in action, in the planning for this particular shot:
You can mark the target landscape object, and mark the proposed location of the camera. Then the app will do a simulation of the landscape (right) with whatever sky object you want - moon, Milky Way, etc., at whatever time you want. It'll even tell you when key times are (moonrise, sunset, etc.).
This has really saved a lot of time because it allows me to figure out exactly where to be at what time. More importantly, it has told me what I cannot do - for example, the Milky Way never rises over Half Dome. Another example is this past weekend, when I was hoping to take another Milky Way photo, but PlanIt! informed me that the waning gibbous moon would be situated right in the middle of the Milky Way.
