As landscape photographers, one of the great challenges is knowing when to be at a location for either sunrise, sunset, moonrise or moonset. A few years ago, we discovered a software program Heavenly-Opportunity that makes this task much easier for photographers in the United States.

Heavenly-Opportunity accurately predicts the time and location for each of these events, as well as the phase of the moon for over 30,000 locations in the US. The program includes information for much more than just about every city or town in the country. It also includes information on 500 National Parks, National Wildlife Refuges, and recreation areas and 2500 names lakes, mountains or other named geographic feature In the past we had to find information for the nearest major city, now we can have information about the exact location we’re planning on shooting at. On our recent trip to Blackwater and Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuges, we knew exactly when and where sunrise and sunset would be, which made it easy to plan our photography.

In addition, the software allows you to enter a latitude and longitude and get information for a specific place. This is a great feature if you are using GPS to determine your location.

Another wonderful feature is the ability to search for specific criteria for a location – and determine what dates you should plan on shooting. For example, we had been trying for several years to get a photo of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol Building with a full moon over the Capitol. We knew where to take the photo from (in front of the Netherlands Carillon near the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, VA), that if the moon comes up between roughly 80 – 100 degrees and if moonrise after sunset – we should be able to get the image we want. With Heavenly-Opportunity, we knew there were four nights between July 2006 and June 2007 to take the photo. One of them was on March 4, 2007.

That night, Bill took the photo we call Full Moon Over DC.

Full Moon Over DC (c) 2007 William Lawrence

Yes, Bill really did get the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, US Capitol Building with the Tower of Learning of the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress silhouetted by the full moon all in one shot. It’s not a composite image. And it only took us four years of trying to get this photo.

Heavenly-Opportunity isn’t the first software we tried for keeping track of the sun and the moon. We still use Ephemeris by Jonathan Sachs on our Pocket PCs. It’s fine if we need quick info out in the field.

Heavenly-Opportunity has two main advantages over Ephemeris: the much larger number of locations included in the program and the search function. The search function alone is well worth the cost of the software. If we’re planning trips, we use this program to plan where and when to be.

Heavenly-Opportunity is distributed as shareware by Fossil Creek Software of Fort Collins, CO. You can use an unlicensed version for 30 days. After than, you really should purchase the license. The cost for a licensed version is $ 24.95. The license allows you to install as many copies of the program as you need – we have it installed on both our desktop machines and our laptop.

As far as we are concerned, Heavenly-Opportunity is must-have software for landscape photographers. We really encourage everyone to go to the Fossil Creek site and download the trial version. Be sure to buy your copy before the 30 day trial period is up. Once you start using Heavenly-Opportunity – you will wonder how you ever got along without it.