Solvara Hours

Photographers chase it, gardeners plan around it, early risers just want to know when the sky turns amber. Solvara Hours answers one question for anywhere on Earth: when does the light happen today?

Give it a name and a pair of coordinates — a city you're flying to, a ridge you want to shoot from, the cabin with no signal — and it draws the whole arc of the day. Sunrise and sunset. Solar noon. Civil dawn and dusk. Day length down to the minute. And the two windows that matter most to anyone who works with light: the morning and evening golden hours, and the blue hours that bracket them.

The Today screen sketches it all on a hand-drawn sun path. A curved arc traces where the sun rides across your chosen day, an amber band hugs the horizon to mark the golden window, and when the date is today a bright marker slides along the arc to show roughly where the sun sits right now. Tap between your saved places with the chips up top.

Every figure comes from the standard NOAA solar-position equations, run right on the phone. That has a nice side effect: the app doesn't care what time zone your handset is set to. Each place carries the UTC offset you gave it, so a location you saved for Reykjavik reads correctly even while you're sitting in Lisbon.

Places is where you build your list. Add a spot with its latitude, longitude and offset; the offset picker steps in half-hours from GMT-12:00 all the way to +14:00. Edit or delete any time, and tap a place to make it the active one everywhere else.

Calendar lets you scrub to any date with plain year, month and day steppers — next weekend's shoot, the solstice, a trip in November — and shows the same full breakdown plus a compact strip of the days on either side. Head far enough north or south and it will simply tell you the sun does not set, or does not rise, for that date.

A left-edge navigation rail keeps Today, Places, Calendar and About one tap apart. Switch between 24-hour and AM/PM in About, where you'll also find plain notes on how the numbers are made.

A few honest caveats, kept in the About tab rather than buried: the times are model estimates and can be off by a minute or two, and daylight saving is never applied for you — each place uses the offset exactly as entered, so nudge it by hand when a region's clocks change.

Why you might like it
- Golden hour and blue hour, morning and evening, not just sunrise/sunset
- A drawn sun-path arc with a live position marker for today
- Correct for any coordinates regardless of your phone's own time zone
- Half-hour UTC offset picker from GMT-12:00 to +14:00
- Clear polar-day / polar-night states for high latitudes
- Two example places seeded on first run so there's something to look at