Night Photography Resource

Timing is everything. Knowing when the moon rises and sets helps you decide when you want to go out and take pictures, or what effect you'll get on any given day. Similarly, knowing with twilight occurs can also help you time your shots to achieve a certain look.

The US Naval Observatory has an online tool which produces a one year table of sun or moon rise and set times. All you need to do is enter in the coordinates of your location and it'll do all the math. I used to use this extensively, but looking up the coordinates for a location and typing them in is a bit of a pain.

After getting tried of struggling with coordinates, I created Sun or Moon Rise/Set Table for One Year a simplified interface to the US Naval Observatory's tool. Instead of manually keying in coordinates you can now pick your location from a map. Easy!

Now you can plan ahead by looking at the astronomical conditions and you can schedule your time accordingly to get the effect you want.