Celeris – Astro Photo Planner

See the night before you photograph it. Celeris shows you where the sun, the moon, the Milky Way or any object from a catalogue of around 9,000 entries stands in the sky — for any place and any moment. One screen: a map, a time scrubber, the sky. THE MILKY WAY WIDGET It looks for the next dark, moonless night and draws the sky as a 14 mm frame aimed at the moment the galactic centre stands highest. A tap opens the app set to that moment. For the home screen and the lock screen. SKY OVER THE MAP Rise and set directions, position, altitude and the band of the Milky Way — drawn around the place you picked. TERRAIN Celeris draws the real land: surveyed heights from Copernicus WorldDEM-30, fetched once and then kept on the device. In the 3D view your own horizon stands where the flat floor was — the sun, the moon and the stars go behind its ridges, and rise and set gain the moment at the ridge as a second time. For all of Europe and the United States. GROUND FOG Where terrain has been fetched, Celeris lays a fog layer in the valley: you set the fog top and the visibility. So you can see beforehand whether the castle stands out of the fog sea. BUILD YOUR OWN FOREGROUND Assemble what stands in front of you from cuboids, wedges, hip roofs and measured footprints — in metres, at the real terrain height, and stand on your own tower. The app also fetches more than 100 simplified, surveyed landmark models across Europe and the Americas. ISS TRANSITS Every crossing of the sun and the moon by the space station, and every close pass within 2°, for the spot under the crosshair — with the time to the second and how large the station appears. Free. ENDLESS TIME SCRUBBER A band of twilight colour with no ends, zoomable without steps: pinch it open for three hours, closed for three days — and the same swipe carries you accordingly far. The sun's arc, the moon's beside it, and the moon riding its curve: how high it stands and how much of it is lit. SIMULATED CAMERA VIEW Dial in a focal length and a direction and see what a full frame body captures, with each body's path across the day behind it. On the map the same frame becomes a cone. 3D VIEW The cube-shaped “3D” button opens the simulated view across the whole screen: every body at once, the sky swiped around with a finger. Here the sun and the moon are drawn as bodies rather than icons. ECLIPSES Every solar and lunar eclipse your place gets, years ahead. A detail page draws its course against the real horizon. DARK NIGHTS Astronomical night combined with moonrise and moonset: when it is worth going out. In the month calendar, night by night ahead — moon phase, and how long the Milky Way and your object stand in a dark sky. Tap a night and the app plans for it. VISUALISATIONS TO SWIPE THROUGH Main events, a circular day clock, the twilight phases, the event list and altitude timelines for every object. OBJECT CATALOGUE 8,920 stars plus all 110 Messier objects, searchable by name or catalogue number, with magnitude and the times above the horizon. LOCATION AWARE GPS, place search — and the time zone of the place you are planning for, not the one your phone happens to be in. HONEST MATHS Celeris calculates with SwiftAA using the standard methods of spherical astronomy — moon positions topocentric, for where you stand. FREE AND FULL VERSION Celeris is free and stays free. What is limited is how far ahead it plans: 48 hours. The full version opens any date and unlocks the month calendar, the eclipse list and the widgets — one payment, no subscription, bought once and unlocked on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Plans, places and your own models travel between iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud. Everything is calculated on device. No accounts, no trackers, no ads. German and English. The star catalogue is derived from the HYG database by Astronexus and from OpenNGC by Mattia Verga, both CC BY-SA 4.0; sources and download are in the app under More → Star catalogue.