LightTide: Golden Hour Map

Drag the time bar under the map. The sky above the map turns into the light of that moment — gold spreading, blue hour settling in, the Milky Way window opening. Decide where and when to shoot today, on one screen.

LightTide is a light planner for photographers. Sun (golden hour, blue hour), moon (rise, set, phase) and the Milky Way (galactic core window) sit on one map, and moving time moves all three together.

■ The time bar is the whole app
Drag it and the sky wash runs from day into golden hour, into blue hour, into night. Bearing lines point at the sun and the moon; when the Milky Way window opens, its band rises over the map. Every time you cross into a new stretch of light, you feel a small tick.

■ Everything is computed on your phone
No account, no sign-up, no server, no analytics SDK. Your coordinates never leave the device, and times and saved spots keep working at shooting sites with no signal. The internet is used only to fetch map tiles. Fetching a tile does tell the map provider which area you are looking at — that is true of every app with a map. The provider's own usage-data collection is switched off in LightTide.

■ Checked against published sunrise and sunset times
Sun, moon and galactic-core positions come from established astronomical algorithms (NOAA solar equations, Meeus) and are verified against times published by the US Naval Observatory. Where a definition varies — such as where golden hour starts and ends — the app states the value it uses in Settings.

■ See which months your season opens
Twelve months in one row, for any place on Earth: how many nights the Milky Way is up each month, and how many of those also have little moonlight. The screen that answers the first question of a trip planned months ahead.

■ "Next Light" on your Home Screen
See when the next golden hour, blue hour or Milky Way window starts, right on the Home and Lock Screen — without opening the app.

■ Save a place, get told when the light comes
Save a spot and its golden hour and Milky Way times for today are summarized in one line. Optional alerts fire before the evening golden hour and only on nights the Milky Way is up.

■ When there is nothing, it says why
White nights with no darkness, latitudes where the galactic core never rises, months before the season starts — instead of a blank screen you get the reason and the next chance.

LightTide is a calculator, not a weather app. It does not predict clouds or light pollution. Where the sun, the moon and the galactic core are, and when — that is what it can tell you.