The Complete Guide

GoldenLight is a planning app for landscape photographers — it tells you where to stand, when to be there, and whether the sky will be worth the drive. This guide walks through every core surface: the map, the calendar, the color forecast, and the condition chips. No prior experience assumed.

How the app is organized

Five tabs along the bottom. Everything in this guide lives in one of them.

Map Scout is a satellite map with a photographer's toolkit layered on top. Search for a place or pan to it, drop pins, and use the time scrubber at the bottom to see exactly where the sun, moon, and Milky Way will sit at any moment — today or a year out.

The tool strip (right edge)

Three button groups run down the right side of the map:

Placing anything: the crosshair reticle

Every pin places the same way — no fat-finger taps:

1. Tap the pin button you want (Subj, Pin, Cam, or Scout). Crosshairs appear at the center of the map.
2. Pan the map so the crosshairs sit exactly on your target — your finger never covers it. A banner at the top confirms the mode: "Pan map to position · Tap Place to confirm".
3. Tap the red Place button (the Cam slot turns into it). Tap Cancel to back out.

The time scrubber

The panel above the tab bar is a time machine. Drag the graph left or right and the entire map re-computes for that moment — sun and moon positions, azimuth lines, everything.

Azimuth lines — reading the map

Select a pin and colored lines radiate from it. Thick dashed lines are the day's fixed anchors; thin bright lines move as you scrub time:

Camera + Subject: the FOV cone

Place a Cam pin and a red lens cone spreads out from it — the wedge of landscape your lens will frame. Add a Subj pin and the cone snaps to aim at the subject automatically. The badge on the cone's center line shows the focal length (52mm in the shot below); drag the cone's edge handles to widen or tighten the framing and the badge recomputes. From here the ··· menu offers Save as Plan and Horizon Profile for the pair.

The ··· menu

The dropdown in the top corner holds the rest: Save as Plan (captures the current pins + scrubbed time), Horizon Profile, map style (Standard / Satellite / Hybrid), and map layers — Wildflower Blooms, Viewpoints, Active Fires, and Hotspots. The bar under the search field names the plan you're working on ("Untitled 1" until you save it) alongside the scrubbed date and time.

Saved pins

Your personal library of shooting locations — the foundation everything else builds on.

A saved pin is a named spot on the map that survives between sessions. Saved pins show as white dots with their name underneath. Three ways to create one:

1. The Pin button — tap Pin in the tool strip, aim the reticle, tap Place. It saves instantly with an automatic name ("Interest Pin 3") — rename it right away to something real.
2. Search — search for a place with the search bar, tap the result, and choose Save Pin from the action sheet.
3. From a search result dot — Event and Scout searches offer "Save as Interest Pin" / "Save Pin" on their result cards, so a spot the app found for you becomes permanent.

The pin card

Tap any saved pin to open its card:

Monitoring a pin

One toggle turns a map pin into a location the whole app watches.

On any saved pin's card, switch on Monitor Conditions. The pin turns gold on the map, and from that moment:

The Conditions tab answers one question for every location you monitor: how good will the color be at sunrise and at sunset? The answer is the Lumen Score — 0 to 100, computed separately for each event from real forecast physics: the cloud canvas overhead, whether the horizon has a clear gap for light to come through, air clarity, and whether terrain blocks the sun.

Score	Tier	Read it as
80–100	Epic	Drop everything.
60–79	Great	Worth the drive.
40–59	Good	Promising — watch it.
20–39	Fair	Maybe, if it's close.
0–19	Poor	Sleep in.

The list

Your current location plus every monitored pin. Each card carries its tier word under the name, a sunrise meter and a sunset meter with event times, and a one-line reading of the sky ("High cloud canvas — brilliant color likely"). The small teal tag next to each score tells you which day that prediction is for: TODAY, TONIGHT, or a weekday once tonight's event has passed and the forecast rolls to tomorrow. A banner at the top calls out the single best chance across all your locations.

The detail sheet

Tap a location. The toggle at the top switches everything between sunrise and sunset analysis:

The Calendar shows the month for your selected scout location — the header names it, and it follows whatever pin you've selected in Map Scout (or your GPS position when no pin is active). A legend under the month title decodes the dots; each day cell carries:

Tap a day for the detail card: the sun's arc with sunrise and sunset times, the Moon Tonight card, and the full Milky Way timetable — the same shootable-window headline, timeline bars, and rise/set table described in the Night Sky section below, computed for that specific date. Long-press a day to start a plan for it.

Home opens with a greeting and the golden-hour countdown ("Golden hour in 9h 21m"), a location pill showing which spot the chips are reading, and then the chip grid: live summary tiles, each backed by a full detail sheet. Tap a chip to open it. Best Color leads the grid with your strongest upcoming sunrise or sunset across every monitored location. The avatar in the corner opens your profile.

Chip	What it summarizes
Best Color	Your best Lumen Score location and time — sunrise or sunset, whichever wins.
Weather	Current conditions; the sheet has the hour-by-hour cloud and wind forecast (section 8).
Fog & Mist	Fog likelihood at your monitored pins — valley mist mornings.
Storm Drama	Convective drama potential — the dramatic-sky index, not a severe-weather warning.
Night Sky	Tonight's Milky Way shootable window (section 9).
Aurora	Live Kp · Bz and a four-state go/no-go pill (section 10).
Smoke	Air quality for photography — is the haze going to kill your distant ridges?
Waves	Coastal swell and tide drama at your coastal pins (section 11).
Flora	What's blooming near you, from live observation data.
Exposure · Compass · AR	Field tools — exposure calculator, declination-corrected compass, AR viewfinder.
Your Plans · Settings	Shortcuts to the Plans tab and Settings.

Weather

The chip shows now. The sheet shows the hour that matters.

Tap the Weather chip for the full sheet. The location pill under the header switches between your current location and any monitored pin. Top to bottom:

Night Sky

One question, answered: is there a shootable Milky Way window tonight?

A shootable window needs three things at once: the sky fully dark (sun 18° below the horizon), the galactic core above the horizon, and the moon below it. The Night Sky sheet finds the longest stretch tonight where all three hold — that window is the verdict.

Aurora

Live space weather, translated into "do I go outside or not."

The chip shows the two numbers that matter — Kp (global geomagnetic activity) and Bz (the solar wind's magnetic tilt) — plus a pill that does the interpretation for you. When a solar eruption (CME) is on its way, a gold line on the chip counts down to impact.

Pill	Meaning
Quiet	Nothing happening at your latitude. Sleep.
Watch	Activity building — get somewhere dark with a clear northern horizon.
Active	Aurora likely visible from your location. Set up now.
Go Now	Major storm in progress. Drop what you're doing.

The sheet goes deep, top to bottom:

Waves

Swell, tide, and drama for your coastal pins.

Waves needs a monitored pin on the coast — it reads open-ocean swell and NOAA tide predictions for that spot. (An inland pin will politely show nothing; that's expected.)

Where to go next