Heliodial: Sun Path & Position

Which way does the sun set from your garden, and when does the light go gold tonight? Heliodial works it out for any place and date and draws it on one dial. The dial is a sun-path diagram: the zenith in the middle, the horizon round the edge. Today's path runs across it in the colour of its light, cream at midday and gold in golden hour. Sunrise and sunset sit on the horizon as compass bearings, and the June and December paths mark the sun's northern and southern limits. DRAG THE DAY The whole day is one strip, coloured by its light. Drag along it and the sun moves on the dial. One tap jumps to sunrise, golden hour, sunset or blue hour. EVERY WINDOW OF LIGHT, TO THE MINUTE Golden hour and blue hour, morning and evening. Sunrise and sunset with their bearings. Solar noon and how high the sun gets. Civil, nautical and astronomical twilight, and the length of the day. Any date, any place. WILL THE FENCE SHADE THE BED? Enter a height: the fence, the neighbour's roof, the parapet in front of your panels. You see how long its shadow is and which way it points, hour by hour through the day, and at noon for every month of the year. THE WHOLE YEAR UNDER YOUR FINGER Daylight, golden hour and blue hour for every day of the year on one chart. Drag across it to read any day: sunrise, sunset, day length and both golden hours. Useful for picking the week of a shoot, or for knowing how dark the garden gets in December. THE SKY CAMERA Hold the phone up and today's sun path is drawn over the live camera, with the hours along it, sunrise and sunset on the horizon, the sun at the time you are planning and the moon. Drag the day strip and the sun moves along the real sky. THE MOON TOO Moonrise and moonset with their bearings, the phase and how much of it is lit, and its track on the dial, including the nights it rises after midnight or never sets. A COMPASS FOR THE SUNSET Lay the phone flat or hold it up like a camera. Pick the sun, sunrise or sunset and it tells you how many degrees to turn. It uses the same true-north heading as the sky camera, and says so when the compass needs calibrating. ANYWHERE, WITH NO SIGNAL Use your location, pick from more than 200 cities, or type coordinates, and save the places you come back to. Everything is calculated on the phone: the sun with NOAA's solar equations, the moon with Meeus's lunar theory. You don't need an account or a connection, and your location and the camera view never leave the phone. Golden hour here is the sun between 6° above and 4° below the horizon; blue hour is 4° to 6° below. Times assume a flat horizon, so hills and buildings make the real sunrise later and the sunset earlier. One payment. No subscription and no ads.