Golden Hour: Sun Moon Planner

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About this app

Plan a shoot around the light. Pick a place, pick a day, and see when the light will be good and where the sun will be when it happens.

TODAY
A timeline of the whole day: golden hour and blue hour in the morning and the evening, with the length of each window, plus sunrise, sunset, solar noon, moonrise, moonset and the moon phase. Step forward or back a day, or jump to any date you like.

COMPASS
See where the sun and the moon are right now, and where they will be later. The bearing and altitude are always written out in degrees, and the day's path is drawn as an arc with ticks at the sunrise, sunset, moonrise and moonset directions. Drag the time slider to scrub through the day and watch the arc move. Turn location on and the dial rotates with your phone; leave it off and it stays north-up.

30 DAYS
A month at a glance, one row per day: morning and evening golden hour, sunrise and sunset, and the moon phase. Tap a row to open that day.

PLACES
Search a city and start planning. The city database is on your phone, so search works with no signal. Save the places you shoot at and switch between them. You never have to turn on GPS — but you can, with one tap, if you would rather use where you are.

REMINDERS
Off until you turn them on. One reminder before morning golden hour, one before evening golden hour, 15, 30 or 60 minutes ahead. That is all — no other notifications.

HOW IT WORKS
Every time is calculated on your device with an open-source astronomy engine, checked against published almanac data. Golden hour is the sun between 4 degrees below and 6 degrees above the horizon; blue hour is 6 to 4 degrees below. Nothing is fetched from a server, so the app keeps working where your signal does not.

Far north or far south, the app tells you what is actually happening — that there is no sunrise today, that daylight never ends, that there is no blue hour tonight, or that golden hour runs past midnight — instead of leaving the row blank.

The app is free and supported by ads. Ads appear on Today and 30 Days, and never on the Compass while you are lining up a shot.

Made for landscape and portrait photographers, videographers, drone pilots, and anyone who plans around the light.