The electronic helpers

You are here: Nature Science Photography – Natural light – Orienting in the field

To prevent the illusion of absolute precision once again: The described methods and the following programs do not help us to 100% certainty. Each indication must be considered within a certain tolerance, which we must then compensate on the spot either by taking a few steps to the side or by waiting a few minutes to produce the optimal situation.

Heavenly-Opportunity (https://heavenly-opportunity.software.informer.com/) is an application especially designed for photographers that allows to search for sunrise and sunset / moonrise and moonset events in a targeted and location specific way and to match them optimally. Particularly noteworthy for USA travel: The program offers a 30,000-location database of 500 protected landscape areas and 2,500 important topographic formations, such as mountains or rivers. Heavenly-Opportunity is available as shareware.

Photo Ephemeris (https://photoephemeris.com/web) does the same as Heavenly Opportunity, but is much more professional with more application options. There is a free version and a paid Pro version.

The Astrocalc program (www.astrocalc.com/) allows us to search for dates when the sun, moon or a planet is located in the part of the sky thus defined, specifying longitude, latitude, azimuth and elevation angle (entered as min/max values to have a certain margin). AstroCalc is a free application since 2020.

sunPATH (https://andrewmarsh.com/apps/staging/sunpath3d.html), on the other hand, is a specialist in the orbit of the sun. It calculates the orbit for any place in the world using an extensive database and the possibility of manual position entry, and also displays it graphically under various selectable aspects. It is a commercial and paid program.

moon Calculator (https://www.mooncalc.org) is a web application that calculates information regarding the position, phase, orientation, and visibility of the moon for any date and geographic location and can also graph it. It is free to use.

A good source of data is the US Naval Obervatotry website (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/). Here you can get precise data on sunrise/sunset times, moonrise/sunset times, moon phases, eclipses, and the positions of objects in our solar system calculated for your geographic location.

Last but not least, I would like to recommend the extraordinarily informative collection of Java applets that Jürgen Giesen has compiled at www.geoastro.de. Here you can have the most exciting connections from physics and astronomy calculated online and acquire a wealth of data and background knowledge.

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