The Light Table: a golden-hour & sky planner that runs in your browser
Good light doesn’t wait for you. If you take pictures (or you just love a good sunset over the lake), you know the particular ache of showing up ten minutes too late, when the gold has already gone flat and blue and the moment is over. I’ve wanted, for a long time, a simple way to know ahead of time exactly when the good light starts and ends, and which direction the sun will be when it does. So I built one.
It’s called The Light Table, an old name for the glowing surface photographers used to lay slides out on, and it’s here:
What it tells you
Pick a place and a date, and it lays out the entire day’s light. The morning and evening golden hour: that warm, soft, flattering light right around sunrise and sunset. The blue hour on either side of it, when the sky goes that deep even blue that’s so good for water and cityscapes. And the three stages of twilight as the sky darkens the rest of the way. There’s a little chart of the sun’s whole arc across the sky, with a marker showing where you are right now, so you can see the shape of the day at a glance.
Which way the sun goes
It also tells you which direction the sun rises and sets (an actual compass bearing) and that turns out to matter more than you’d think when you’re trying to line up a hill, a steeple, or the far shore. Today in Neenah the sun sets around 305°, way up in the northwest. Come December it’ll drop at about 237°, swung way around to the southwest. Same spot, completely different photograph, and now you can see that coming weeks ahead.
The moon, and the dark
For the night owls there’s a moon panel: the phase, how lit it is, and when it rises and sets, plus a dark-sky readout that tells you when the sky is truly dark (astronomers call it astronomical night) and whether the moon is going to be up washing out the stars. If you’ve ever tried to shoot the Milky Way, you already know a bright moon is the whole ballgame.
Any place, any date
It opens at home (Neenah, on Lake Winnebago) but you can search for any city, tap “use my location,” or type in coordinates for whatever patch of nowhere you’re planning to camp in. And you can scrub the date forward to plan a shoot for next weekend, or peek ahead to the solstice. Wherever and whenever you point it, the times come out in that place’s local clock.
And it’s completely private
This is the part I care about most. Every sunrise, every moon phase, every angle is worked out right there in your browser, from astronomical math. There’s no account, no ads, nothing to install, and nothing about where you are or what you’re planning ever leaves your device. I didn’t even lean on a weather service or a maps API for the heart of it: it’s all just math, running quietly on your phone or your laptop.
Go plan some light:
Jamie
