NEW: Sky Cover, rebuilt. A fast, smooth 72-hour forecast map of clouds, fog, rain and snow that moves with the wind. - PRECIP replaces Satellite: where rain and snow will fall over the next three days, with dots where thunder is possible. AMOUNT shows how much; CHANCE shows the odds (US). - WIND adds GUSTS. - Clouds, clarity, fog and rain draw in full forecast detail, with no blocky edges, exactly where the forecast puts them. - Every forecast layer opens in about a second and fills all 72 hours in about 20 seconds. Playback runs at a smooth 60 frames per second. - Tap anywhere on the map for a readout. The Fall Color Map goes global: Europe, and Japan and Korea, join North America. Search any place by name, or jump to your saved spots. Winter sky: rise and set times for Orion, the winter Milky Way and Andromeda, and the Daily Report recommends them on dark, clear nights. Emberlight scores are steadier and more accurate, and say when the forecast is solid or uncertain. The Week Ahead on Today shows the dawns, dusks and clear nights worth planning around, and always names the place it is for. Also: warnings and watches list newest first, and Settings has a new section about the photographer behind the app.

NEW: Fall Color Map. Tap anywhere in North America for a fall color score and the typical peak date, then press play to watch autumn sweep across the continent. - PEAK WEEK shows where color usually peaks this week. - See color beyond the big hardwood forests: understory and streamside color in the West, aspen groves, river valleys. - Few trees where you tapped? One tap jumps to leafier forest nearby. - Save the spot or plan the shot right from the map. - SATELLITE shows a real recent view of the season from space. - The Fall Color card on Today now uses the same estimates as the map. Also: smoother and more battery-friendly when you switch away from the app.

See tonight's real sky: the Milky Way is now NASA's survey of the galaxy's light, placed for your exact spot and minute. • Sky Tonight, the Viewfinder and Live View draw the photographic Milky Way, dimmed by moonlight and twilight the way the night will dim it. • The stars are the real sky to magnitude 6.5, each in its own colour. • Ready for winter: the whole sky in every season. When the Milky Way core stays down, Sky Tonight marks the winter Milky Way, Orion and Andromeda, and Live View shows all 21 constellations, winter ones included. • Dusk and dawn now glow from the sun's side of the sky, and Live View no longer paints the Milky Way over daylight. • Updated License Agreement: you'll be asked to accept it once. • Reliability improvements and fixes.

ISS Tracker now loads reliably, everywhere. • Orbit data comes from three independent sources, so the live position, passes and Sun and Moon transits load in seconds. • If the orbit servers can't be reached, the tracker says so and keeps retrying on its own — with a Try again button — instead of waiting. • Reliability improvements and fixes.

One pull now brings in fresh weather, space weather and warnings together, and the Field Manual got a big upgrade. • Pull down on Today to update weather, space weather and weather warnings all at once. Do it a few hours before you head out, and again before you leave. With Pro, the ↻ button also reruns tonight's written reports. • Field Manual: 90+ topics you can browse by category, with every feature explained in plain language (tap the settings gear → Field Manual). • Scout Nearby only suggests scenic places (waterfalls, viewpoints, lakes, parks and trails), not businesses that happen to share a name. • Field Guide tips only mention tides and cold water at your coastal spots. • Weather warnings no longer get stuck on "Checking…", and they say clearly when a check couldn't finish. • Clearer meteor shower wording after the peak, and more accurate lightning-alert settings.

Line up the shot. The new Viewfinder shows the sun, Moon or Milky Way over your subject, with real terrain, and Find the Spot suggests where to stand. • Alignment Window: upcoming dates when the Moon or sun lines up with your subject and clears the skyline • Should I go tonight? An hour-by-hour planner shows the best hour for your shot and what is limiting it • Live View: tap to meter, exposure lock, exposure compensation and one-tap infinity focus, plus a clearer sightline check • Lens Tools: depth of field, hyperfocal distance, ND filters and sharp-star exposure times • Offline trip packages: download terrain and a forecast before you lose signal • Saved plans keep the frame, lens, time and subject so you can return to the same shot • Emberlight: fuller sunset and sunrise heat maps, with a NOAA backup forecast when the main weather source is down • Deep Sky Tonight: a top-3 card with a full pop-out list • More accurate Moon and sun positions, and steadier weather-alert monitoring

Today's Insight no longer invents a date. The on-device writer now knows what day it is, is told never to say so, and any lead that names a year or runs long is replaced by the plain field brief.

The Today card now says where tonight's best site actually is, and shows how your #1 spot scored when a different spot wins the night. Comet Watch: the outlook line now follows the comet's actual trend. Emberlight alerts are stricter about what earns a push: three forecast models have to agree, the light path toward the sun is checked, and a low ceiling or rain reported nearby holds the alert. Forecast reliability and planning improvements: - Better handling of unavailable weather data and stale forecasts. - More consistent sunrise and sunset timing across Emberlight views. - Improved local forecast sampling and aurora data freshness checks. - Daily briefing scheduling and renewal improvements. - Pro entitlement checks hardened for retail installations. Your saved locations and existing Pro purchases are preserved.

Updated App Store screenshots and descriptions make it easier to explore shooting windows, sky conditions and night-photography planning.

The Kp forecast in the 27-Day Outlook now runs hour by hour across the full three days instead of a handful of three-hour blocks. Moon calendar: dark-core nights that were slipping through the cracks get their dot again. Dawn and dusk briefings for a spot in another time zone now show the time on your own clock, with the spot's local time alongside.

Plan a shot from the top of the Sky page. The six planning tools — Map Planner, Viewfinder, Find the Spot, Night Sky, Live View and Darklight — now sit in a deck at the top of the Sky page, above tonight's Milky Way window. Tap Viewfinder and you land on your last landmark plan; tap Find the Spot and the solver opens ready to tell you where to stand. Tonight's events — ISS passes, transits, meteors, eclipses, comets — follow underneath, in their own section. Sky Cover radar and satellite, rebuilt. Both loops now load every frame before they play, with an honest count while they do, and then run smoothly off memory instead of stuttering through half-painted frames. Satellite zooms in as cloud imagery rather than blocks, and the loop no longer blends last night into this morning. Fall color. A new seasonal card on the Today tab, only during the approach to autumn and the season itself. It reads the places you follow and where you are standing, estimates when each will turn, peak and fade, ranks them for today, and tells you what to look for there and what light to shoot it in. It is an estimate from geography, not a forecast — it says so, and it treats the week as the target rather than the day.

The Viewfinder — see the shot before you drive. Drop a second pin on the thing you actually want in the frame: a lighthouse, a butte, a bridge tower, a mountain. Shutter Scout measures it — how far away, which bearing, and how tall it stands in degrees — then draws it at its true angular size with the moon, sun or Milky Way core placed exactly where they will be, inside a rectangle that is your sensor at your focal length. Scrub the minute and watch the moon climb its track across your subject. Find the Spot answers the harder question. Ask for the moon behind Mount Hood at 600 mm and it hands back a coordinate and a minute, because once you fix the lens and the framing, how far back you have to stand stops being a guess. Tap a result and the map pin walks there and the clock sets itself. Alignment Window scans the next 60 nights for every moment the moon, sun or core crosses your landmark from where you are standing — dead behind it, grazing the edge, or clearing the top — and reports the window to the second. Also new: a starter roster of landmarks with their published heights, a 24-hour sun, moon and core arc you can drag to scrub the whole night, and saved plans that now remember your subject as well as your spot. Every number here is geometry from the offline ephemeris — no network, no forecast. It tells you where the light will be. Whether the sky cooperates is still up to the sky.

The Map Planner — drop a camera pin anywhere on Earth and see exactly where the light will land. Bearing rays radiate from your pin for sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset and the Milky Way core, each labelled with its time. Solid rays show where the sun, moon and core actually are at whatever minute you scrub to — any minute, any date, a year ahead. Search a place by name, and the clock follows the pin, so a spot in another timezone reads in its own local time. Found a composition? Save This Plan stores the pin, the date and the exact minute, and Saved Plans puts you right back there in one tap. An AR button on the map opens Live View for that spot, so you can plan on the map and then point the phone at the sky. The moon calendar now marks dark core nights too — a dot on the days with genuine moon-free Milky Way time.

Shutter Scout now tells you about the big nights BEFORE they arrive. Eclipses, named full moons, meteor-shower peaks and close planet pairings all feed one "Coming Up" list in your daily report and Field Guide, each with enough lead time to actually plan around — and when something rare falls tonight or tomorrow, it leads the report instead of hiding below the weather. Eclipses get the full local treatment: real contact times for your spot, how high the Moon or Sun sits at greatest, whether the Moon rises already inside Earth's shadow, and the exposure guidance to shoot it. Partial lunar eclipses now send an alert — they never did before — and every eclipse reminder gains a morning-of nudge. Also: tapping any date in the moon calendar now moves the whole card with it — phase, illumination, moonrise, moonset and that night's Milky Way core window. Moonrise and moonset are paired to the same lunar pass, which fixes repeated times and correctly names the day each month when the Moon doesn't rise at all. Comet Watch reads live data again and now recommends the comet that is genuinely best placed tonight rather than whichever carries the smallest magnitude number.

Ready for the winter sky: when Milky Way core season winds down, the app now recommends the winter roster — Winter Milky Way arch, Orion, Andromeda, Pleiades, Double Cluster, California Nebula, and the Rosette — each with real imaging windows and field advice. On fall nights when the core and the winter sky share one night, it recommends both: core early, deep sky late. Also: the Emberlight extended forecast fits on one page and labels the alert window honestly (alerts only ever fire for the next two events), Mountain Weather gains an overnight line per elevation band plus a snow-level estimate, and the Today and Sky pages are reordered for faster reads.

Lunar eclipse maps now use the same five visibility bands as published eclipse charts: entire eclipse, all of the partial phase, some of the partial phase, penumbral only, and not visible. Boundary accuracy improved as well, so spots where moonrise falls within minutes of first contact land in the right band. Also in this release: the lunar eclipse visibility map itself — open any lunar eclipse and tap "See it on the globe" to see exactly what your saved spots will get, and a fix for a map-projection error that shifted eclipse overlays at high latitudes.

NEW — AIRCRAFT TRANSITS: a live watch for jets silhouetted on the sun or moon. Open Sky → Aircraft Transits and the app checks every plane within 40 nautical miles against both discs from your exact spot, surfacing candidates minutes ahead and locking a countdown in the final minute. A tester asked for it; it's a first. Also: 27-day aurora outlook dates now display fully on every device, eclipse paths run to their true sunset end, Ask Scout quality improvements, and refreshed screenshots.

New App Store listing and screenshots. Under the hood: Ask Scout quality fix and stability improvements.

• Ask Scout quality fix — chat replies now use the same anti-repetition settings as the rest of the app. • Stability improvements.

• NEW: Planetary Conjunctions — your nightly briefing flags close planet pairings (and Moon meet-ups) visible from your sky, with the shooting window, direction, and height. Alerts arrive two days ahead plus evening-of, timed to your sky. • Field Guide prose overhaul — smarter, tighter writing with a quality gate that keeps the report crisp. • Eclipse path maps now extend to their true sunset end. • 27-Day Aurora Outlook layout fix; expanded in-app Field Manual (50 features). • Refined prediction algorithms and stability improvements.

• NEW: ISS Tracker — your next visible Space Station pass, its live orbit, a 5-day schedule, and point-at-it guidance in Live View. • NEW: Sun & Moon transit finder with a full chase map — the visibility band shaded on the map, crossing times along the line, suggested parking spots, and one-tap driving directions to the centerline. Disc diagrams show the chord the station will cut. Solar-safety guidance included. • NEW: ISS alerts — 15 minutes before bright passes; the day before and 90 minutes before nearby transits. • Lightning map now covers a full 100 miles, with a matching alert radius option. • Eclipse schedule extended through 2040. • Refined prediction algorithms and stability improvements.

• New detailed Tide Report: tap the Tides card to see every coastal spot you've saved — plus wherever you're standing — each with its own tide curve, upcoming highs and lows, king & minus tide flags, and live water temperature. • Sky tab reorganized: your planning tools up top (Night Sky Planner, Darklight, Live View), followed by sky events (Meteor Showers, Next Eclipse, Comet Watch). • Aurora alerts are faster and more dependable — including official NOAA storm warnings, often before the sky lights up. • Refined prediction algorithms and stability improvements.

Eclipse maps, rebuilt — in time for the August 12 total solar eclipse. The path of totality is now computed from the ephemeris itself: a single smooth gold band showing the real ground track, with the partial zone graduated in blue beneath it and a legend naming both. Check the August 12 eclipse — the corridor runs Greenland to Iceland to northern Spain, matching the published NASA map. Every solar eclipse in the catalog gets the same treatment, including annular "ring of fire" paths.

Comet Watch, Mountain Weather, and a smarter Emberlight headline this release. • Comet Watch — the brightest comet in the sky has a permanent home on Today and the Sky tab, with the full brightest-first list, real positions in Live View, and planning support in the Night Sky Planner. • Mountain Weather — pick a mountain or pass as one of your spots and Today gains a 3-day forecast at the mountain's own elevations (base, your spot, summit) with freezing level and gust warnings. • Emberlight now scores wildfire smoke the way photographers experience it — light smoke enhances the show and earns a bonus; only heavy smoke mutes it. Clear-sky scores vary with the actual air, with a CLEAR tag so quiet stretches explain themselves. • Smoke map shows NOAA's observed-smoke outlines alongside the forecast. • Aurora: live and official Kp shown together, clearly labeled, and alerts always match the screen. • Reliability fixes for NOAA data gaps.

Eclipse Awareness comes to Shutter Scout. • A new card in the Sky tab tracks every upcoming solar and lunar eclipse for your locations. See the full schedule, watch each eclipse's path of totality and partial zone on an interactive globe, and get a heads-up a month, a week, and a day before the major ones. • New Satellite layer in Sky Cover — a live, true-color GOES loop from NASA over your region. • Travel-aware clock — the app's date and time now follow your local timezone as you travel, while each of your saved spots keeps its own time. • Aurora alerts now track the live Kp number, and Solar Wind alerts fire the moment any threshold you set is crossed. Powered by a new high-precision astronomy engine for exact, on-device eclipse timing.