Ridgelight: Sun & Moon Planner

Sunrise is not when the sun clears the ridge. Most sun apps time the light against a flat sea horizon. If you shoot in a valley, a canyon or a city, that answer is wrong by twenty minutes to two hours. Ridgelight reads the terrain around you and tells you when the light actually arrives. The few apps that do read terrain bury it inside a photography suite you have to learn first. This one does the one thing, on one screen. FIRST LIGHT AND LAST LIGHT - The moment the sun clears the skyline, and the moment it drops behind it - How much later that is than the flat sunrise every other app shows you - The angle of the ridge doing the blocking, and the direction it sits in THE SKYLINE, DRAWN - The horizon profile for where you are standing, all the way round - Where the sun appears and disappears, marked on it - Worked out by casting rays over open elevation data to 40 km, corrected for the curve of the Earth and for the way the atmosphere bends light THE LANDSCAPE, IN 3D - The hills around you, built from the elevation data and lit by the sun where the sun will actually be - Watch the shadows move down the valleys as you scrub through the day - See which face goes gold first, and which one stays dark until nine WILL THERE BE ANY LIGHT? - Cloud over each window, judged the way a photographer reads it rather than a weather app: a clear sky is flat, and it is broken high cloud that turns red - Visibility, because a ridge 30 km away disappears into haze long before it disappears into cloud ECLIPSES, FOR WHERE YOU STAND - Every solar and lunar eclipse that reaches your spot for the next three years - Worked out for your exact position, so the times are yours and not the middle of the track - And the part no eclipse table has: whether your own skyline is in the way THE LIGHT, IN ORDER - Golden hour and blue hour as windows, in gold and blue - Civil, nautical and astronomical twilight - Moonrise and moonset, also over the real skyline - Moon phase, the next full moon, and how much it will wash out - Solar noon, and the shadow ratio at any moment - The Milky Way core: when it is up, high enough, and the sky is properly dark ANY SPOT, ANY DAY - Search by landmark, not just by address. Half Dome, not 37.7459, -119.5332 - Save the places you shoot - Scrub to any future date LIVE VIEW - Hold the phone up and see where the sun and moon go - Compass off? Tap the sun where you actually see it and the correction sticks BUILT TO BE QUIET - One price. Everything included. No subscription, no unlock, no account, no advertising - Your location is worked out on the phone and never sent to us. Apple sees it only when the app fetches your cloud forecast - Anonymous usage and screen recordings help fix confusing screens. Your place names and coordinates are masked before anything leaves, and one switch in Settings turns it all off - Positions computed on your phone, checked against standard astronomical algorithms - Terrain is cached, so a place you have looked at once works with no signal For landscape, astro and wedding photographers, and anyone who has stood in the cold waiting for light that had already gone behind a hill.