Sunset Map vs LightTide

Find the best sunset spot, anywhere. The map shows where the evening light will be, and real photos show what you'll shoot before you go. THE LIGHT MAP The map glows gold where the sun shines until it truly sets, and fades to purple where hills or buildings cut the evening short. Computed from real terrain, real buildings and real sun positions. On your phone, no account. TAP ANYWHERE Tap any point and know its evening: when the golden light starts, when it ends, and how many golden minutes the landscape leaves you. Every time is the spot's own clock, with one line converting it to yours. REAL PHOTO SPOTS, REAL PHOTOS Camera pins mark places people actually go for the picture: viewpoints, castles, lighthouses, and the places photographers demonstrably shoot. Open a famous spot and see real photos of it, full screen, before you go. GOLD AND GEMS Gold pins are the famous spots with superb light for your chosen day. Zoom way out and they stay visible across a whole region. Where nothing reaches gold, lavender gems mark the best spots around here. And "Best spots near you" ranks them all by golden minutes. PLAN ANY DAY The calendar works worldwide. Jump to next Saturday, or to October: the map, the pins and the gold all follow the date. Sunset or sunrise. CITIES INCLUDED At street scale the map counts buildings, street by street: quays, squares and rooftop-lined avenues each get their true evening light. YOUR SPOTS Save a place with one tap: it names itself, and the list shows each spot's own sunset time and minutes of real light. Search any street or city and land right on it. One tap hands a spot to Apple or Google Maps to get you there. ALSO Tilt to 3D: the light math stays exact. A cloud badge shows the forecast for the golden window (Apple Weather). FREE AND MEMBERSHIP The free plan covers tonight, near you: the full map, one search a day, and spot checks nearby. Membership unlocks any day and any place on Earth, plus unlimited searches and saved spots: monthly 2.90, yearly 24.90 with a 7-day free trial, or lifetime 69. MADE BY ONE PERSON I create content, and I kept wishing I knew where the golden light would land, for sunsets and for sunrises, and what a spot really looks like before going. So I built Sunset Map for myself first. I'm happy it can help you too. PRIVACY No account. Nothing tracked that identifies you. Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

Drag the time bar and the light moves across the map. Golden hour, blue hour and the Milky Way window on one screen, in the local time of the point you pick. No account, no server of ours. Your coordinates stay on the phone, and the calculations keep running where there is no signal. A map where the light moves Drag the time bar and the sky over the map, the lines pointing to the sun and the moon, and the band the Milky Way traces all move to that moment together. It is not a table of times: you run a finger across a whole day of light. A short haptic marks the moment you cross into golden hour or out of it. Nothing animates on its own — the light moves while your finger does. Tonight's Milky Way window The hours when the galactic core sits above the horizon and the sky is dark enough that astronomical twilight has ended. You get the direction and the altitude of the core at its highest point, and where the moon stands over it: No moonlight, Faint moonlight or Strong moonlight. Moon and season Moon phase, moonrise and moonset, plus a season calendar that lays out a month one night at a time. Among the nights the Milky Way is up, pick the nights with little moonlight and set your shoot date. Spots and heads-ups Save the places you shoot from. Each one lists today's golden hour and Milky Way window in a single line. Notifications before evening golden hour and before the Milky Way rises are optional. Checked, not guessed Positions of the sun, the moon and the galactic core are computed with established astronomical algorithms (the NOAA solar equations and Meeus) and checked against published sunrise and sunset times. Every definition the app uses is written out in Settings. On a night the Milky Way stays down you get the reason — the latitude is too high for the core, the sky never gets dark enough, the season is wrong — and the next chance. Weather is not part of this LightTide tells you where the sun, the moon and the galactic core are, and when. Clouds and light pollution sit outside the math, so nothing here is promised as visible; reading the sky that night is yours to do. Privacy No account. No usage tracking. No server of ours. The only network traffic is map tiles, and LightTide has the map provider's usage tracking switched off. Fetching tiles does tell that provider which area you are viewing — true of every app that draws a map. Once the tiles are cached, the app keeps working at a trailhead with no bars.