The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D Lets You REALLY Track the Sun

The Photographer’s Ephemeris is a popular app that allows you to plan a landscape shoot by showing you the position of the Sun and Moon. Essentially, it’s a map-centric sun and moon calculator. But a brand new 3D version is launching, and things are about to get rather cool.

The latest version, dubbed The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D, allows users to watch a sunrise or sunset from the future. You can view land, anywhere in the world, in 3D and watch the light fall onto it as it will in real life.

TPE 3D also offers the ability to watch the stars in this incredible 3D movement. If you want to see where the Milky Way will appear, or when the afternoon sun will disappear behind a valley, then the new version of this iOS app will tell you.

The key benefits of TPE 3D are enticing, to say the least:

Sun, moon and stars are shown against a 3D model of the actual landscape: you can see if the moon is next to a specific mountain peak
Controls for date, time of day and camera position are designed with photographers in mind: it’s easy to check the light for just the time you need
Seeing the light against a topographic map makes it easy to interpret: satellite map images often have shadows ‘baked in’
In enhanced mode, you can control the focal length of camera, making TPE 3D useful as a guide to composition and lens selection

The original version of TPE was released in 2009, so a major update and overhaul is definitely welcome. But the app sits in the mobile arsenal of many outdoor photographers around the world already, and hopefully this new update will continue the trend in success of this incredibly handy piece of software.

The original app allowed you to see the precise direction of the sun or moon at any point throughout the day from a given location. This was handy enough, but the new version let’s you see how the light itself falls onto the landscape. This means you can check out shadows and other details before you get out into the field.

The Photographer’s Ephemeris 3D is available in the iOS app store for $20 already in select countries, and will be available worldwide on the June 27th, 2017. A bundle price will be made available for users upgrading from the original TPE app to the 3D version.