Supported Features
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Larger Text
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Dark Interface
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Reduced Motion
LightTide: Golden Hour Map
Drag time, plan the Milky Way
Only for iPhone
Free · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.
iPhone
Drag the time bar under the map and the sky takes on the light of that moment. Gold spreads, blue hour settles, the Milky Way rises. All of it computed on your phone.
Drag the time bar and the light moves across the map.
Golden hour, blue hour and the Milky Way window on one screen, in the local time of the point you pick.
No account, no server of ours. Your coordinates stay on the phone, and the calculations keep running where there is no signal.
A map where the light moves
Drag the time bar and the sky over the map, the lines pointing to the sun and the moon, and the band the Milky Way traces all move to that moment together. It is not a table of times: you run a finger across a whole day of light. A short haptic marks the moment you cross into golden hour or out of it. Nothing animates on its own — the light moves while your finger does.
Tonight's Milky Way window
The hours when the galactic core sits above the horizon and the sky is dark enough that astronomical twilight has ended. You get the direction and the altitude of the core at its highest point, and where the moon stands over it: No moonlight, Faint moonlight or Strong moonlight.
Moon and season
Moon phase, moonrise and moonset, plus a season calendar that lays out a month one night at a time. Among the nights the Milky Way is up, pick the nights with little moonlight and set your shoot date.
Spots and heads-ups
Save the places you shoot from. Each one lists today's golden hour and Milky Way window in a single line. Notifications before evening golden hour and before the Milky Way rises are optional.
Checked, not guessed
Positions of the sun, the moon and the galactic core are computed with established astronomical algorithms (the NOAA solar equations and Meeus) and checked against published sunrise and sunset times. Every definition the app uses is written out in Settings. On a night the Milky Way stays down you get the reason — the latitude is too high for the core, the sky never gets dark enough, the season is wrong — and the next chance.
Weather is not part of this
LightTide tells you where the sun, the moon and the galactic core are, and when. Clouds and light pollution sit outside the math, so nothing here is promised as visible; reading the sky that night is yours to do.
Privacy
No account. No usage tracking. No server of ours. The only network traffic is map tiles, and LightTide has the map provider's usage tracking switched off. Fetching tiles does tell that provider which area you are viewing — true of every app that draws a map. Once the tiles are cached, the app keeps working at a trailhead with no bars.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, KYUNGHWAN KIM, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
The developer indicated that this app supports the following accessibility features. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- KYUNGHWAN KIM
- Size
- 73.3 MB
- Category
- Photo & Video
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 16.4 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 16.4 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 12.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
English and 43 more
- English, Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokmål, Oriya, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 kkh