The sun and moon photo planner for iPhone and Android photographers.

Golden hour is the period around sunrise and sunset when the Sun is between about 4° below and 6° above the horizon. It starts slightly before sunrise in the morning and ends slightly after sunset in the evening. Its exact times change with your location and the season. Photons shows what light comes next, golden or blue hour, with a countdown, the moment you open it.

Blue hour comes when the Sun is about 4° to 6° below the horizon, before sunrise and after sunset. At mid-latitudes that band takes 10 to 20 minutes; broader definitions that include more of twilight stretch it to 30 or 40. In high-latitude winters it lasts much longer. Photons gives the range for the date and place you choose. Near the poles in summer, a period that runs past midnight isn't listed yet.

Golden hour happens with the Sun just above or near the horizon: warm, low, directional light and long shadows. Blue hour comes after the Sun is fully down (or before it rises): soft, shadowless, cool light, with city lights balanced against the sky. In the evening one follows the other, so you can shoot both in a single outing.

Choose a subject and a spot far enough away that a telephoto lens makes the Moon look large next to it, often one to several kilometres. Then find the dates when the Moon rises or sets in the subject's direction. In Photons, drop a camera pin and a subject pin, then tap the calendar button to list every such moment in the next year.

Sunset direction changes through the year: due west around the equinoxes, toward the north-west in summer and the south-west in winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Photons draws the sunset and sunrise directions as lines on a map from any spot, and shows the Sun's full path over your camera in AR.

The calculations do. Light times, the AR view and your saved plans work without a connection. Set your camera and subject pins while you have signal, and the alignment finder runs offline too. Maps, place search, place names and the local time zone of a picked place come from the phone's map service and need a connection.

Photons doesn't send your location to us; it has no servers. It uses your location on your phone to calculate the light, and stores it only in a plan you save, on your device. To show the name of the place you're in, your coordinates go to the phone's geocoding service, and the map and search use the phone's map service, under that provider's privacy policy. On iPhone, that's Apple Maps.

Sun positions are accurate to about 0.01° and Moon positions to about 0.02°, a small fraction of the Moon's width. Photons computes light events precisely and shows them to the minute. Real times can still shift with unusual air temperature and pressure; hills on the horizon aren't modelled, and from a summit sunrise comes a few minutes earlier than shown. Give yourself a few minutes either side.

Photons is available for iPhone and Android. On iPhone it needs iOS 17 or later; on Android, [Android minimum version] or later. The AR sky view uses the camera, gyroscope and compass, so it works best away from metal and magnets.

PhotoPills and The Photographer's Ephemeris are broad planning toolkits. Photons is narrower and quicker: two pins and one tap list every date in the next year when the Sun or Moon sits behind your subject. Everything is calculated on the phone, with no account. It runs on iPhone and Android, and Milky Way planning isn't available yet.

Not yet. The engine already computes the galactic centre's position, rise and set, but there are no Milky Way screens in the app today. Milky Way planning is in development and comes after the first release.

The Photons interface is in Polish, with English planned [confirm date]. Times, directions and degrees read the same in any language.