It occurs to me that I should mention an unexpected application for the lowly, forgotten, TPE for Android that I benefitted from on location during the eclipse. I used both a motorized star tracker and a manual equivalent to follow the sun from C1 though C4. In order for these to work they needed to have at least a rudimentary polar alignment, the closer the better. Polar alignment requires that you sight on the Polaris, the north star, or at least aim you tracker to true north and angle it up to the local latitude, which will closely approximate the location of Polaris.
I could have polar aligned the night before, but it was cloudy, and I wasn’t eager to get up early anyway. But I discovered that I could use TPE for Android to locate my shooting position by GPS, and then use the gray pin to mark straight south (I didn’t have a long view to the north), and use that to identify landmarks to the south. I then attached my camera to the tracker with a long lens aimed it at a distant object I now knew to be straight south, and aligned the tracker with that reference. Now that it was on a north-south axis, I only needed to angle it upward at an angle equal to my latitude, and I had a polar alignment.
This turned out to be plenty good enough. I only had to make a couple minor adjustments to the tracker during the 3 or four hours of the eclipse, which is consistent with what I get when I truly use Polaris to polar align.
So even though it is no longer supported, the basic geodetic function of the Android app served me well for optimizing my field setup on the fly. Glad I still have it on my phone. Would love to have it have the capabilities of the iphone version.
Dave
