Sun Moon Expert

I compared Photopills and The Photographer’s Ephemeris a couple of weeks ago. They are both excellent tools for planning landscape photography shoots. After the blog was published, I was approached by one of the co-founders at MIOPS to look at their Sun Moon Expert app, which they describe as ‘a comprehensive solution for tracking the movements and positions of the sun and moon’. I like to be open with my reviews; in this case, I have been provided complimentary access to this app’s paid features.

What is Sun Moon Expert?

MIOPS has traditionally been a photography accessory business with a range of triggers, sliders and tripod heads designed to make shooting creative shots easier. They have recently moved into iPhone photography apps with SNAP, a tool that allows you to control your iPhone camera, and now, Sun Moon Expert, which helps to plan photographs that will include the sun or moon. If you don’t have an Apple iPhone, you won’t be able to try out this app. It is currently only available for iOS devices and not for Android. I am assured by the developer that an Android version will be coming, but the focus at the moment is to make the iOS app as good as possible.

The Sun Moon Expert app has three sections to it. At the top of the screen is an overview of your current locations, showing how long of the day or night is left, and a couple of blog posts from the MIOPS website. The middle section is where you can plan either sun or moon shots. Finally, the bottom part of the screen has some tools to calculate. The Depth of Field calculator will show how much of the image will be sharp based on the aperture, distance to the subject and zoom being used. A 500 Rule / NPF calculator allows you to calculate the shutter speed required to ensure that objects (such as the moon) are not affected by the rotation of the Earth. An ND calculator allows you to determine the shutter speed required when adding an ND filter. Finally, the timelapse calculator will calculate the number of images required to photograph a timelapse video and the size of the memory card that will be required.

Sun Planning

The primary use of the Sun Moon Expert app is to plan sun or moon shots. Clicking on the Sun section from the main screen opens a new screen. It’s not immediately obvious, but the icons at the bottom of the screen can be dragged to the left to show more options from this screen.

The first of these tabs provides an overview of the sun’s activity for the chosen location and date. It’s fairly basic information such as sunrise, sunset and times of the next event, such as golden hours, blue hours or twilight times. The second tab shows the times of all the solar events for the chosen day and location. You can also set a reminder where the event is in the future so you don’t miss it. Tab three gives a graphical representation of where the sun and moon will be at each hour of the day or night. It’s a helpful overview tool if you aren’t familiar with a location, but it’s not a view I would use that often.

The fourth tab is the augmented reality view, where the planning tools are embedded. Rather than describing how this part of Sun Moon Expert works, I have recorded a video showing how to determine the date and time the sun will be visible over a particular position.

I like the simplicity of identifying the date and time when the sun will align with the object’s position. However, at the moment, the Sun Moon Expert app can only be used to calculate the position when you are standing at the location. I would like to see similar functionality with the same simple process, but when you aren’t at the scene. This is possible in Photopills, but it needs quite a bit of understanding of how different pins are dropped and the sun’s azimuth.

The final tab is a compass screen that can show the height of the sun or moon at the selected location, with an overlay of the current sun or moon position. Again, I am not convinced that there is massive value in this view, and it isn’t one I could see myself using that often.

Moon Planning

Moving back to the main screen, we can click on the moon section and are offered a similar layout to the sun planning screens. Some screens, such as Map, Augmented Reality and Compass, are the same, but there are additional moon-specific screens.

The overview screen shows the moonrise and moonset times and how much of the moon is lit by sunlight. The second tab shows a monthly calendar view of the moon phases, so you can identify when full or new moons will occur. The third screen shows a little more detail about each day with the moonrise, moonset times, and the distance from the earth, which will determine how big or small the moon will appear in the sky. The final new screen in the moon section shows the days each month when the moon is either at its maximum brightness or at its closest phase to the Earth.

The Augmented Reality view works similarly to the sun AR screen, as shown in the video below.

Again, determining the dates is simple, but it can’t be used if you aren’t at the actual location when planning. There is another issue with the moon planning selection: you are shown when the moon aligns with the subject for all the moon phases. In reality, most photographers would prefer to see when the moon aligns with the object and the moon is full (or at least has a percentage visible greater than, say, 95%).

A good start

There is much to praise about the simplicity of using the Sun Moon Expert app. It makes planning a sun or moon shot much more straightforward than either TPE or Photopills. However, that is only when you are physically at the location to plan a shot. The subsequent iterations of the app would be great to see the same simplicity of setting up a shot at a location you haven’t yet been to. I don’t know many photographers who want to climb a mountain to use the AR functionality to determine when certain conditions will be met in the future.

Another feature that I would love to see is for a photographer to be able to select a particular feature, such as a lighthouse, tower or bridge and for the app to determine where a photographer needs to stand so that they can capture the moon or sun at a particular point on the subject. I don’t see this available in any app currently, but it would be beneficial. However, this would also need Sun Moon Expert to fix another issue.

The overlay in the Map screens is the Apple Maps 2D view. This doesn’t make it possible to identify objects like the Nelson Monument featured in the other two competitor apps. Adding a satellite view would help make the planning process much easier.

Finally, quite a few of the screens in the app, such as the Moon Details screen, would work much better in landscape orientation than in portrait. Currently, the app doesn’t rotate to give an alternate view when the phone is turned. There is a similar issue in Photopills, but TPE does rotate, and I find this can help use the available real estate more effectively.

How do I get Sun Moon Expert?

The app is only available for iOS devices and can be downloaded from the App Store or by clicking on the MIOPS website at. To use most features, you must subscribe at 99p per month; a six-month subscription costs £5.99, and an annual subscription costs £9.99. I am not convinced of the pricing model being used for the app, as the annual subscription is the same as the outright purchase cost for Photopills. I know the developers have some plans for added-value functionality not currently available on Photopills or TPE. When this is available, it might be better for them to offer the core planning features either for free or as a one-off cost and then allow subscriptions for added-value services. This is similar to the model TPE uses with its Skyfire tool for adding weather predictions to the planning process.

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About the author

As well as running Edinburgh Photography Workshop, Rich Dyson is a professional photographer. His photographs are regularly used in newspapers such as The Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph. He also had two solo exhibitions and was featured in a members-sponsored exhibition in the Scottish Parliament. You can see and buy his photography at richdysonphotography.com.