New utility by Jeff Conrad: Sun/Moon calculator

[Alan Klein]

Actually you just reminded my that my wife has an iPad. I could try TPE on it to see how it works. But I'm not sure if that would work. Does an iPad have built in compass like a smart phone? Do you need a compass to operate your program?

[Jeff Conrad]

Alan,

I’d much rather plan a shot on an iPad than on a smartphone—simply because of canvas size. Note that you need iOS 8.1 or later. If you have that covered, you should be fine. I think you would find at least some of the features useful—and for nine bucks, how can you go wrong?

iPad manuals seem to indicate that all iPads have had compasses, but I don’t have an iPad, so I can’t comment from experience. I’m not sure the compass is that important, though. If a shot requires careful planning, you need to do the planning before you arrive at a location. And you’ll usually get much better results from geodetic calculations (the grey marker in TPE) than from pointing a compass—electronic or ancient.

A compass is irrelevant to the Sun/Moon Calculator, which is too ancient to be aware of such things. A compass may be helpful if you need to make field measurements, but as I mentioned, you’ll usually get better results determining directions with geodetic calculations, using either TPE or my Az/Alt Tool. A compass may be helpful once you get to the field; I use one (a venerable Silva Ranger) on which I can compensate for magnetic declination. Most electronic compasses are supposed to handle this automatically, but I don’t know what happens with an iPad.

There is no reason you can’t use both TPE and the Sun/Moon Calculator. You may find that you prefer one or the other, or you may find that one is better for some things and the other is better for others. If you want to find days on which the Sun or Moon is within specified ranges of azimuth and altitude, the Sun/Moon Calculator is the only show in town. For most other things, you’d probably prefer TPE. Judging from your Flickr albums, you don’t seem to be OCD on lining up the Sun or Moon with a mountain or building, so my calculator may not do much for you.

In any event, if your wife’s iPad has 8.1 or later, getting TPE for it would seem a no-brainer.