Solunus

visit website on Github

This is a personal project born from the frustration I had when out photographing and wanting to capture the moonrise, but had no idea when it was. There are some online resources for looking up these times, but they require a bunch of information that is clunky to type on a mobile device, and usually only display a chart of times that you then have to read on a small screen, when all I really need is simply the time.

So I made a website that finds your location based on IP (HTML5 geolocation coming soon!) and uses coordinates to display your location's sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset times in a clean, easy-to-read display. This has come in handy countless times for me since I made it in May 2012 and I'm hoping it can be of use to others as well.

The website uses an IP lookup service for the coordinates, city, and state information, and the calculations for the times are done in PHP. The planned use of HTML5 geolocation will use JavaScript, perhaps exclusively, or in combination with PHP, and the switch to this is being done for use by mobile devices using cell service since the true IP is obscured by many, if not most, providers. Not being to use the service on the fly (apart from the pre-programmed places) diminishes the overall usefulness of the tool significantly.