Sun Surveyor (Sun & Moon)

Adam Ratana

About this app

Sun Surveyor takes the mystery out of the sunrise, sunset, and moon phases, allowing photographers and filmmakers to scout the best locations, plan effectively, and get the perfect shot.

The Live Camera View, Interactive Map (with Street View), 3D Compass, and detailed Ephemeris provide a wealth of information about the largest natural light source in the galaxy, as well as the moon, and milky way:

- View augmented reality projections of the sun and moon paths, pinpoint the time the sun or moon will be at a particular location in the sky
- Predict and plan for the golden hour, blue hour and every sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset
- Prepare night photography shots with the Milky Way & star trail features

Solar Industry (PV) Professionals, architects, real estate agents, and gardeners will also find a wealth of empowering interactive features:

- Show clients the quality and quantity of seasonal sunlight at a given location
- Understand potential shade of surroundings and discover any obstructions
- Create images of the summer and winter Solstice & Equinox paths for a site

Additional features:

- Photo Opportunities (new!) - an interactive listing of critical times to help inspire and generate shot ideas; including the full moon looming low in the sky during magic hour, total darkness for stargazing, and more
- Position Search (new!) - an extremely powerful tool to search for sun, moon and milky way center positions within various constraints, for the perfectionist planner
- Visual time machine - take a quick glance at the light for a day, or dial in desired compositions easily
- Moon distance, age, apogee, perigee, super moon predictions
- Sun shadow information - calculate the length of shadows cast by objects
- Share details and locations with clients and colleagues
- Offline usage (excludes Map View, Street View) - enter coordinates, save & load locations with no data connection or GPS available
- Measure distance, and difference between elevations, and vertical angle differentials with the Map view
- Import and export Google Earth .kmz/.kml locations
- Magnetic declination compensation
- Widgets - 9 varieties of sun and moon widgets for your homescreen

** NOTE: the Live View and 3D Compass portions of this app make use of your device's compass. Some devices may not have a compass.

Ratings and reviews

20211031. So far working as expected. Best feature is its integration with Google Maps and Street view. It really helps simplify planning your set up to target alignments. I'd like to see a better sighting compass layout.Get familiar with it first before your first shoot. Unexpected benefit. If you can adjust your driving time, use this app to avoid driving into the low sun. Also great for aerial mapping to pick high contrast times and shadow length.

March 2023. Update: This is still in my top three apps for dialing in astrophotography planning. 2018: I have a few sky apps. I keep coming back to this one, though. It's the best organized, best compass, most accurate information for my needs. Thank you. Over a year now as a happy customer. :) Update: 8 Apr 18 ...still my go to app. Three days from an epic trip to New Zealand. Sun Surveyor, and Google Earth are my two main tools for shot planning. Best app! Thank you.

I've been using this app for years, and it's never let me down. As a wedding photographer I am often tasked with working in tricky and new situations with challenging light. With this app I can track the position of the sun at any given time, giving my clients magical light that I wouldn't have been able to find without this app. It is so simple, you just hold up the phone to the sky and using VR its tracks the position of the sun in a line, using your camera! So cool and nifty. Well worth it.

What's new

2.5.1
- Android 13 update: SDK and compatibility updates, minor fixes and tweaks.
- Added a pure GMT (No DST) manually selectable timezone.

2.5
- (New!) Added a Milky Way Widget
- Android 12+ Widget update: updated 4 widgets to be expandable, with additional info displayed for Android 12+ users.
- Other minor fixes and updates.