About
Built for planning the light, not just checking the time
LightWindow helps photographers understand when the light changes and where it comes from. It combines golden hour, blue hour, sun path, moon phase and eclipse timing into city-specific planning pages.
The goal is practical: choose a city, pick the tool you need, and see timing, direction and visibility in the local clock. No infinite date archive, no generic weather dashboard, no guesswork about compass direction.
LightWindow is designed as a small, durable reference for shoots, scouting, travel planning and the days when the sky might do something worth being ready for.
How the numbers are calculated
Every time on this site is computed with the Swiss Ephemeris, the same high-precision planetary model used by professional astronomy software. Its positional accuracy is on the order of 0.001 arcseconds - dramatically tighter than the simplified solar formulas behind many sunrise calculators, which can drift by a minute or more at high latitudes and around eclipses.
On top of the raw positions, LightWindow applies standard atmospheric refraction, resolves everything to the city’s own timezone (including daylight saving changes), and derives the photographer-facing layers: golden and blue hour windows, compass bearings for light direction, shadow behavior and local eclipse circumstances.
Calculated results are pinned by an automated regression test suite, so an update that silently shifted a sunrise or a contact time would fail the build before it reached you. If you ever spot a time that looks wrong, please report it - accuracy is the whole point of the site.
What the tools cover
- Golden hour and blue hour
- The daily windows of warm low sun and even twilight color, with start and end times, duration and the compass direction the light comes from.
- Sun path
- The sun’s full arc for the day - elevation, azimuth, solar noon and day length - as an interactive diagram.
- Moon
- Tonight’s phase and illumination, moonrise, moonset, the moon’s highest point, and upcoming full and new moons.
- Eclipses
- Location-aware solar and lunar eclipse pages with local contact times and whether each stage is visible from that city.
Who makes this
LightWindow is built and maintained by the creators of codesmith.in, who kept finding that “sunrise time” answered the wrong question - a photographer doesn’t just need when, they need where from and for how long. The site runs on its own astronomy service and has no outside investors or content farm behind it. You can reach the team on X at @codesmith_in.
Feedback, corrections and city requests are genuinely welcome via the contact page. How data is handled is documented in the privacy policy.