Life on Earth

The Sun: Rise and Fall

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Simple iOS App Displays Sunset and Sunrise Times

This is a dead-simple iOS pp, whose sole function is to tell you what time the sun rises and sets. It has a scroll wheel in the upper right hand corner you can use to scroll backward and forward to see the sunrise and set times on a given day. It also shows the time until sunset during the day, and the time until sunrise at night, as well as the total hours of sun uptime. You can set it to show moonrise and fall, as well as the phase of the moon. There’s an icon for the current weather, and the highs and lows for your area are displayed as well. It’s not as useful as a full-fledged weather app though, but it does give you a nice idea of what it’s like out there.

I find it useful for knowing when to let my very spoiled pet chickens out of their coop, and getting some idea of when they’ll stop laying for the winter, and start up again in the spring. You can localize it fairly easily. If you are traveling and need to know the various rise and fall times for, say, scenic Ulan Bataar, you touch the map icon and move the pin there. Sure, I can look out the window and find out what’s happening now, but for precise information for other times and places, this app is marvelous. And I can do things like discover when the actual equinox is at my house. Turns out that we get 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night on March 17th.

-- Amy Thompson 04/17/13

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