LightTide: Golden Hour Map

Drag the time bar and watch the light move across the map. Golden hour, blue hour and the Milky Way window on one screen, in the local time of the point you picked. No account, no servers of ours. Your coordinates never leave the phone, and it all still works offline. THE LIGHT MOVES ACROSS THE MAP Drag the bar across the day: the sky over the map warms into gold, sinks through blue hour and goes dark. The sun and moon direction lines swing with it, and the Milky Way lights up on the map the moment its window opens. A short tap of haptic feedback marks each change in the light, so you feel it without watching for it. Nothing animates on its own — the light moves only while your finger does. THE MILKY WAY TONIGHT The window is the stretch of night when the galactic core sits above the horizon and the sun has dropped past astronomical twilight (−18°). For that stretch you also get the core’s compass bearing and how high it climbs, plus a plain reading of the moonlight: none, faint or strong. MOON AND SEASON Moon phase, moonrise and moonset — and a month laid out night by night. Pick the nights when the Milky Way is up and the moon stays dark, then build a trip around them. 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. Optional reminders come before evening golden hour and before a window opens. CHECKED, NOT GUESSED Sun, moon and galactic core positions come from established astronomical algorithms — the NOAA solar equations and Meeus — and are tested against published sunrise and sunset times. Every definition the app works from is written out in Settings. When there is no window, the app says why — too far north for the core to rise, a sky that never gets dark enough, or simply the wrong time of year — and gives you the date of the next one. NO WEATHER HERE The app tells you where the sun, moon and galactic core are, and when. Clouds and light pollution sit outside the calculation, and it makes no promise about what you will see. Reading the sky that night is still on you. PRIVACY No account. Nothing tracking what you do. No servers of ours. The only network traffic is map tiles, and the map provider’s usage-data collection is switched off. Fetching a tile does tell the map provider which area you are looking at — that is true of every app with a map in it. Once tiles are cached, the whole app keeps working with no signal at all.