PicPlanner: Open-Source Linux app for Calculating the position of the Sun, Moon, and Milky Way to plan the perfect time to take a Picture

Application screenshot showing inputs for date and time, and tick boxes for the location of the Sun, Moon and Milky Way. Below that a map is shown with the location, and some colour lines indicating the direction of the Sun, Moon and Mily Way radiating out from that location.

People who love to photograph know, that the biggest problem is being at the right spot at the right time. Therefore, landscape pictures should be planned before visiting the place of choice. To plan the location it is important to know the position of the sun, moon, and sometimes also the Milky Way. Where to find the sun at which time is most of the time easy to guess, but when (and in what direction) is the sunset? And for the Milky Way, normally nobody knows where to find it in the night sky at which time at a specific location. This small program should answer all these questions.

But it is not just for landscape photos, as portrait and night photographers will be just as interested in this information.

It is a GTK app that can be complied from source, but I also see some repos, such as openSUSE and the Arch AUR, have already included it. There is also a Flatpak file supplied. It should also run fine on any Linux phones.

Being open source, it may also be of interest to many, to see how the insides work. The source code does have quite a bit of commenting explaining what is going on.

See https://zwarf.de/

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