Keyword: Stellarium

Plate-solving is useful -- especially when you use it to correct a telescope's position in real-time . You also can feed the solver an existing photo and manually read the results but using the output can be cumbersome. Manual copy & paste coordinates of input fields of tools like Stellarium helps, but that approach isn't very user friendly. Here's a different take on this -- solve the image and instantly get the sky map of that region. Again, this is using mostly freeeware tools.

For this article, I use the eclipse on April 15th 2014 as an example and as a location I have picked San Francisco. The path of the moon & the timing is dependent on your own location and you will have to make adjustments for that. Here are some examples and a bit of background of the various attempts : www.ipernity.com/doc/stargazer95050/album/389379