Celeris – Photo Planner

Sun, fog, moon and Milky Way over the real terrain: Celeris shows you the picture for any place and any hour, before you drive out.

See the shot before you take it.

Celeris is next-generation photo planning for every landscape picture: it plans the shot for any place and any moment against the real terrain — the sun dropping behind a ridge at golden hour, the blue hour over a town, a fog sea below the lookout, a rainbow opposite the sun, the moon beside a castle, the Milky Way over it at night, an eclipse, the station's crossing. Day, night and everything in between. One screen: a map, a time scrubber, the sky.

REAL TERRAIN IN 3D Surveyed heights from Copernicus WorldDEM-30, fetched once, then kept on device: sun and moon light the land from where they really stand, the slopes cast shadows, the ridge is your horizon; beside the almanac time stands the moment at the ridge. All of Europe and the United States.

LIGHT THROUGH THE DAY The endless time scrubber is a band of twilight colour: golden hour, blue hour, the twilight phases, with the sun's arc and the moon's on it. The sun is drawn at its true angular size and gets the sunstar of your aperture at a terrain or model edge; a possible rainbow stands opposite the sun.

GROUND FOG Where terrain is fetched, Celeris lays a fog layer in the valley: set its top and the visibility, and see whether the castle stands out of the fog sea. The fog is a simulation to picture the shot with, not a forecast.

THE CAMERA VIEW Dial in focal length, orientation and direction to see what a full frame body captures; on the map that frame becomes a cone, in panorama mode a grid of overlapping frames. 10 to 1200 mm.

FOREGROUND Build what stands in front of you from cuboids, wedges, hip roofs and footprints, in metres and at real terrain height; stand on your own tower. And over 100 surveyed models of castles, structures and rock formations.

THE MOON Phase and position, topocentric where you stand, moonrise beside your subject, earthshine on the dark part. In the sky it is a body, not an icon.

THE NIGHT The Milky Way band and the galactic centre, the zodiacal light, stars that twinkle, with a white core and a coloured skirt. Light pollution is modelled from satellite night lights with a Bortle class — in the full version drawn in the 3D sky, washed over the map in the atlas colours, listed as the dark places nearby. With them dark nights, the month calendar, the catalogue: 8,920 stars, 110 Messier objects, Mercury to Neptune with Saturn's rings.

ECLIPSES AND THE ISS Every solar and lunar eclipse your place gets, years ahead, at the real horizon. And every crossing of the sun and the moon by the station, every close pass within 2° — to the second.

PLANS AND ON LOCATION A plan holds the moment, the place, the object, the bearing and the lens with a rendered picture of the frame, and is passed on as a card. On site, AR lays the calculated sky over the camera picture and leads you to the standpoint; the Apple Watch carries the night ring, the countdown, the compass and complications.

WIDGETS Home and lock screen: main events, the Milky Way, ISS crossings, the countdown to the next plan.

LOCATION AWARE, HONEST MATHS GPS, place search, saved places, the time zone of the place you plan for — and SwiftAA, by the standard methods of spherical astronomy.

FREE AND FULL VERSION Celeris is free and stays free. What is limited is how far ahead it plans: 48 hours. The full version opens any date and unlocks the month calendar, the eclipse list, the widgets and the light pollution features — one payment, no subscription, bought once and unlocked on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Plans, places and your own models travel between iPhone, iPad and Mac through iCloud. Everything is calculated on device. No accounts, no trackers, no ads. German and English.

The star catalogue is derived from the HYG database by Astronexus and from OpenNGC by Mattia Verga, both CC BY-SA 4.0; sources and download are in the app under More → Star catalogue.