The post covers the photography side (certified glasses and a solar filter for every partial phase, and the low-horizon composition trick that made the August 2026 totality over the Atlantic so photogenic) and the planning side: every eclipse through 2030 is built into Inverza with NASA/GSFC eclipse geometry, so the 3D Diorama shows the sun and moon discs overlapping over real terrain with an exact eclipse percentage, and AR Sky verifies the frame on location. Includes exact coordinates, local times, sun altitudes, and compass directions for the best photographic spots of every eclipse through 2030: Luxor and Cadiz in 2027, the sunset ring of fire over Cadiz in 2028, the Sydney Opera House and Queenstown in 2028, Athens in 2030, and Windhoek and Durban in 2030.

Watch Nigel North plan the August 2026 eclipse at Dragonstone on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6rGY1NerxlU

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The post pairs that story (and our short film Stealing Moonrise, in which a time-travelling photographer arrives an hour before Adams to take the photograph first) with the two-part planning workflow in Inverza. Horizon Paths answers the remote question: at what minute does the moon clear that specific ridge, and what is the sun doing at that same minute? The new AR Sky view answers the on-location question: does the frame work from these two square metres, at this focal length? Scrub time to the planned minute, walk until the moon marker sits where the composition wants it, choose the lens, plant the tripod, and wait.

Watch the film on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QecijG_ooNs

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The post walks through the AR Sky view in Inverza 1.5: sun, moon, and Milky Way core drawn onto the live camera feed, anchored to the real horizon, with a time scrubber that lets you stand there at blue hour and watch the core slide into the gap you were hoping for, hours before it is visible. Plus an honest note on compass drift and the Calibrate control.

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The post walks through Inverza 1.4's two new related features: the Set Subject picker that lets you pair a saved spot with a separate subject pin up to 50 km away (with OpenStreetMap classifying the subject into one of 22 kinds: peak, glacier, alpine hut, lighthouse, lake, castle, and so on), and the Photographer/Subject toggle in the Horizon Paths chart that re-renders the terrain horizon and the sun's position from either vantage at the same minute.

The worked example is a real photograph at an alpine meadow: photographer at the meadow's edge in deep shadow, two wooden hay barns 400 m southwest still catching warm side-light from WNW, distant peaks beyond glowing under a dark cloudy sky. The Horizon Paths chart at the photograph's exact minute shows the sun sitting on the photographer's local terrain ridge while still hovering well above the subject's horizon. That 5-10 minute gap is the entire premise of the shot.

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The post walks through each source: the global Open-Meteo forecast as the base layer, directional horizon-cloud probes 40 km in each of the four cardinal directions, air quality for haze and aerosol estimation, the marine API for coastal locations, Overpass / OpenStreetMap landcover queries for terrain context, live METAR observations from the nearest airport for ground truth, high-res regional models (HRRR for the US, ICON-D2 for central Europe, ICON-EU as a wider fallback) for the next 24-48 hours, and previous model runs to detect forecast drift.

It also covers the fail-silent principle that holds the whole thing together: every enhancement is wrapped so that if any one source is down or slow, the base forecast still ships - the user never sees an error, just a slightly less confident answer.

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The post covers the five-phase storm lifecycle, why the inflow side gives the best structure and the outflow side gives the best back-anvil light, how the 700 hPa wind direction tells you where to stand, and how golden-hour overlap turns an ordinary cell into a portfolio shot. Plus the lightning-photography essentials and a brief safety section.

It also covers Inverza's recent Dramatic Storm Clouds upgrade - the detector now reads CAPE, lifted index, and WMO weather code, so windy overcast days no longer fire as storm-cloud opportunities, and real thunderstorms surface with both photo windows spelled out by clock time.

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The post ranks PhotoPills (#1, geometry), Inverza (#2, conditions), Windy (#3, weather visualisation), Viewfindr (#4, spot scouting with own weather detection but manual workflow), and Apple Weather (#5, sanity check), with Sun Surveyor as an honourable mention - and explains how to use them together without overlap.

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From November through February in Europe, the galactic center is in the sky only during daylight. By early April the geometry shifts: the core rises late at night in the southeast, still low. By May and June it climbs to its meridian between midnight and 3 a.m. By September, it sets earlier and earlier, and by October it is done again.

The post compares the European view (core at 15-22° altitude, horizon subject, no Magellanic Clouds, no Carina) with the southern-hemisphere view (core nearly overhead, year-round window, Magellanic Clouds and the full Emu dark lane visible).

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Watch it on YouTube Shorts: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DIwtkxOgowA

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