I’ve been producing 360 equirectangular panoramas using my DSLR + Hugin, and a monster of a shell script to use exiftool to add in all the right EXIF and XMP tags. One of the tags I would like to set is XMP-GPano:PoseHeadingDegrees which is defined as:
Compass heading, measured in degrees clockwise from North, for the center the image. Value must be >= 0 and < 360.
Are there any software tools that can help me estimate the heading? Perhaps something that allows me to cross-reference the expected position of the sun at the coordinates and timestamp of the photo? At the moment, I can very roughly estimate heading based on memory and intuition, but maybe there’s a better way.
Ideally I’d just use a RICOH THETA or some other proper 360 camera with a built-in compass but my question is specifically about estimating the heading from the image data.
Besides the Sun location, if there are a couple of reference points visible in the picture (trees, buildings, etc.) you can just go to Google Maps, look at the satellite image of the area, and find the orientation of those reference points with respect to the picture location.
Since most of my 360 panoramas include the sun, i tried using KStars and that seems to work well!
In Hugin use the Move/Drag tab to center the sun in the panorama (i.e. vertical line of the crosshairs crosses the sun). This step is important because later we will use the sun’s azimuth as the heading of the image itself.
In KStars hit the “pause” button and change the date and time to the approximate time of image capture.
Look for the sun and center your mouse over it. The Azimuth is listed in the status bar:
