The Photographers Ephemeris, or TPE is a really cool app I found that helps me plan a photo outing when the goal is to get sunrise, sunset, or moon photos.  Using either your current location, or a location you search for as a base, it will tell you the time, and location when the sun will rise and set.  It will also tell you the time and location of the moon’s rise and set, and the phase of the moon.

It is available for iOs, or Android mobile platforms.  The Android version I just bought was $4.99 on the Google app store.  You can also download a free desktop version for Mac or Windows based PC’s.

From the TPE web site: “The Photographer’s Ephemeris (TPE) helps you plan outdoor photography shoots in natural light, particularly landscape and urban scenes. It’s a map-centric sun and moon calculator: see how the light will fall on the land, day or night, for any location on earth.”

So how do you use it?  Say you arrive at your photo destination at 4:00 in the afternoon.  Where do you set your tripod?  Well, open up TPE on your mobile device, and put it in compass mode.  It will point out exactly where the sun will be setting on the horizon.  Or, put in tomorrow’s date, and it will tell you exactly where and when you will see the sunrise.

If you’re planning a trip, you can see what the phase of the moon will be when you get there, and when it will be visible in the sky.  Or you can look for the date of the next full moon.

If you have places you visit frequently, you can store those locations as pins.  Then you can quickly and easily check the times of sunset and sunrise.  And it will let you see how the sunlight and shadows will be showing up later in the day.

This is a fantastic little app, and is already helping me to plan a trip to Gettysburg, PA later this month.  Looking forward to the extra help this app will provide in planning our locations, and setting up our shots.