Camera Layout guides

One of the lessons I have learned the hard way (by taking several nights worth of M42 pictures that I cannot use together) is that you need to plan ahead when framing your shots. At first, when I wanted a short exposure of the bright center of the Orion Nebula, I naturally centered that bit in the frame-after all, the quality of the image is greatest there. But later, when I started to collect longer exposures, I found that the object was so much larger that I cut half of it off.

Now the pictures I did take that aren't aligned-there are other ways I can combine parts of them, but I cannot process them together in DeepSkyStacker in the most beneficial way. A few days ago I mentioned that I'm now including a snapshot of the camera position with each set of subs. Well, here's the other habit I'm getting myself into-I put my camera into Starry Night Pro (my digital star map of choice) as an eyepiece, and can have it project that field of view over an object. This image is now stored in my M42 directory, and I can refer to this each time I set up to shoot it.

If only I could have the same rectangle built in to the reticle in my finderscope as well-that could save ages in starhopping to a target.