Recently, I shared a drone light painting (link) I made of an elk with a mountain backdrop. This led me down a rabbit trail. This post is about the means to an end, not the end itself.
This experience taught me a lot about the idea of photographing something in the middle of the sky and the potential challenges when aligning with a particular backdrop and keeping your design perpendicular to the camera lens. It got even more challenging when I went further down the rabbit hole considering how one might use a drone to outline constellations.
This is where it gets interesting - not only because the camera and the constellations are set points of reference, but with the Earth’s rotation, (while the camera is ‘moving’ so to speak) but it’s easier for me to think the camera is stationary and the constellations move and must be kept in frame. The drone itself is the variable and aligning the drone to the constellation and keeping it perpendicular to the camera lens is more than my brain can handle given my storied past with high school geometry..
Now consider the height restrictions (flight envelop), lens field of view, constellation position at the time of night, moon phase and rise.. Needless to say I was ready to chalk this up to a neat idea that would never happen because I don’t have access to physicist at my local space agency and my head was ready to explode. So I did what anyone can do these days. I prompted AI with this challenge. After about an hour of refinement I now can download flight coordinates for Litchi and do exactly what I described above.
I mentioned at the outset of this post, this isn’t about what I created (or more appropriately put - prompted AI to create), it’s that I had a pretty technical challenge out of my depth and I was able to use AI to create something standalone that isn’t dependent of AI, but leveraged it to create what I imagined.
Of course, if you’re interested in checking it out don’t hesitate to ping me, I’m glad to share. I honestly doubt anyone would desire to use this, but it can also be a useful tool for astrophotography or light painting to check out the moon phase, darkest part of the night, Milkyway position, overcast weather forecast, wind, etc.. Below is a long screen grab of the interface.
I hope you found this interesting and inspiring. Enjoy!
