GoldenLight: Photo Planner

There's a night the moon rises right behind your lighthouse. GoldenLight finds it, shows you where to stand, and tells you if the sky will be worth the drive.

It's 4am. An hour of dark road to the spot, and nobody can tell you if the sky will do anything when you get there. Drive, or stay in bed?

I'm Andy, a landscape photographer in Canby, Oregon. Every planning app tells you when the sun rises. GoldenLight tells you whether it's worth being there — at any pin, anywhere.

THE LUMEN SCORE Sunrise and sunset, scored 0 to 100 at your exact pin, not the nearest town. It doesn't just look up. Color comes from under the weather, so the score looks out — along the path the light will actually travel, all the way to the far horizon — and asks whether that light gets through. Clear sky overhead with a wall of cloud out west is a dud. A lid overhead with a gap on the horizon is the night you talk about for years. GoldenLight knows the difference, and says so plainly either way. Five days out, for every spot you keep, ranked. The Sparks Lake sunrise in the screenshots scored 89 the night before. Built and calibrated against real skies by a photographer who was standing under them.

ALIGNMENT ISN'T A FORECAST. IT'S GEOMETRY. Pin the lighthouse. GoldenLight hands you the evening the moon comes up behind the lantern room, and the stretch of beach to stand on to watch it. The sun and moon go where they go. It lines up or it doesn't. • Align — every alignment on that subject, a year out • Event — one moonrise, and the whole line of ground it works from • Scout — backwards: name the subject, get ranked ground to stand on Mt Hood, 50 miles off, the moon on the summit, 6 Oct 2025, from my own house in Canby. I knew that one was coming.

SEE THE SHOT BEFORE YOU BURN THE GAS Horizon Profile raises the real ridgeline from your exact spot out of elevation data, with the sun, moon and Milky Way on it in true position, framed at your focal length. Goat's Eye lifts you off the ground and orbits the spot, looking back across the terrain — stand there before you stand there. Outside, the AR viewfinder lays the same bodies over the live camera and scrubs the day ahead. It all runs on the phone off cached terrain — no signal needed on the ridge.

MAP SCOUT Sun, moon and Milky Way lines swing off your pin. Scrub forward and a week of forecast cloud drifts across the map — watch where it breaks. A color-score heatmap paints the whole view. Light pollution for the dark-sky hunt, public land, live US fire perimeters, and a cone that shows what your lens will frame.

THE 4AM CALL, MADE THE NIGHT BEFORE Pin Alerts watches the spots you pick and tells you when one is forecast to score — sunset hours ahead, sunrise the night before. Widgets keep the score and the next golden hour on your Home Screen.

THE REST OF THE SKY Golden hour, blue hour, astro dark, a Milky Way window and how much moon drowns it. Aurora odds for your own latitude off live solar wind, not one number for the planet. Fog, smoke, sea sparkle. Depth of field, hyperfocal, panorama math, the longest shutter before stars trail, reciprocity for 13 film stocks.

Score, alignment, ridgelines and astronomy work anywhere. Fire and tides are US, blooms Pacific Northwest, waves and sea sparkle want a coast — those layers say so instead of showing nothing.

What you save stays on the device. No account, no tracking. Coordinates go out only so forecasts can answer.

Free: today's sunrise and sunset score where you stand, the weather and the tides. Pro adds the week, your places, Horizon Profile, Align and the rest; Yearly opens with a free month.

Questions, or a sky it got wrong? andrew@andrewsambucetophotography.com — I read all of it.

GoldenLight Yearly and GoldenLight Monthly are auto-renewing subscriptions; GoldenLight Complete is a one-time purchase and does not renew. A subscription renews unless cancelled at least 24 hours before the period ends. Manage or cancel in iOS Settings, under your name, in Subscriptions.

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