Why I built GoldenLight

I'm Andy Sambuceto, a landscape photographer in Canby, Oregon. I've spent a lot of mornings driving to the coast in the dark hoping for color — and a lot of drives home after the sky gave me nothing. The apps I used could tell me when the sun would rise, and where. What I really wanted to know was whether it was worth going.

Like most photographers, I also ended up with a folder of six or eight apps — one for sun position, one for sunset color, one for aurora, one for weather, one for tides, one for the Milky Way. All good tools. But most of them are complicated enough that I only ever half-learned them, none of them talk to each other, and planning one shoot meant stitching the answer together myself.

GoldenLight is my attempt at something simpler: the things a landscape photographer needs to plan a shoot, gathered in one place, in plain language. I built it for myself first, but I've tried hard to make it work for two kinds of photographers at once. If you're chasing your first sunrise, I want it to give you a straight answer — go here, be there at this time, here's whether the sky looks promising. If you've been at this for decades, the real numbers are all underneath — terrain data, alignment solvers, live solar wind — without the homework.

The heart of it is the Lumen Score, a 0–100 prediction of sunrise and sunset color. It works from the physics that actually make a sky burn: the clouds overhead that catch the light, whether the horizon has a clear gap for that light to come through, how clean the air is, and real 30-meter terrain data for the ridges that block the sun at your exact spot — not at a city twenty miles away. It's honest in both directions. Most days genuinely aren't worth the drive, and I'd rather the app tell you that than talk you into another gray sunset.

What that looks like in practice

The Prediction

The Photograph

Around the score is the rest of the kit, built the way I actually work a shoot:

• Map Scout — a satellite map with a time machine. Scrub to any moment and see where the sun, moon, and Milky Way will be.
• Alignment searches — find every date the moon touches a summit from where you stand, or pick the date and let the app draw the line of spots to stand on.
• Horizon Profile — the actual ridgeline rendered in 3D from your tripod position, with a lens simulator.
• The condition chips — aurora with live solar wind, tonight's Milky Way window, coastal swell and tides, hour-by-hour cloud layers, fog, smoke, and what's blooming.

The Plan

The Photograph

Everything stays on your phone. No account, no tracking, no data collection.

The guides below walk through everything — no experience assumed. It's a beta, which means it isn't finished and you'll find rough edges. Tell me about them.

— Andy