How to Use AR Sky View to Scout a Shot Before Dark

Every planning app will give you an azimuth and an altitude. The problem is that neither number knows about the ridge, the church tower or the row of poplars between you and the thing you want to photograph. You can do everything right on paper and still arrive to find the moon comes up behind a hill.

AR Sky View exists to close that gap. It draws the sky over the live camera, so you can stand at the spot and simply look.

Open it in daylight

This is the part people get backwards. AR Sky View is most useful in the afternoon, at the location, when there is nothing in the sky yet.

Point the phone at the horizon you plan to shoot over. You will see the sun and moon where they are now, the planets, and the band of the Milky Way running across the scene. Everything is drawn in the camera's own perspective, so a marker sitting just above the treeline on screen will be just above the treeline tonight.

Scrub time forward

The time scrub is the feature that makes the rest of it worth having. Drag it and the whole sky moves — markers, arcs and the Milky Way band together — while the camera view stays where it is.

So the scouting workflow is:

• Stand where you intend to put the tripod.
• Frame the foreground you want.
• Scrub to the hour you plan to shoot.
• Look at where the marker lands.

If the moon is behind the hill at 21:30 and clear of it by 22:10, you now know to arrive at ten past ten, and you know it from the actual spot rather than from a compass bearing you have to translate in your head.

Read the arcs, not just the markers

A marker tells you where something is at one moment. The dotted arcs tell you the whole path — the curve the sun or moon will trace across that scene through the day or night.

That is the faster read for two common questions. Does the sun pass behind that building at any point? Follow the arc and see. Where will the moon actually clear the ridge? The point where the arc emerges from behind the skyline is your answer, and you can scrub to it to get the time.

You can toggle the sun, moon and Milky Way independently, which is worth doing — with all three on plus the planets it gets busy, and for most shots you only care about one of them.

Use the frame overlay for focal length

The overlay draws your lens's field of view onto the sky. This settles the question that otherwise gets answered by driving out and finding out.

The moon is about half a degree across. That is small. At 200mm on full frame you have roughly a 10° horizontal field, so the moon occupies about five per cent of the frame width — a lot smaller than most people picture. The frame overlay makes that concrete: set your focal length, and see whether your subject and the moon fit in the same shot at all, or whether you need to back up and go longer.

For the Milky Way it answers the opposite question — how much of the core arc a 14mm or 20mm actually takes in from where you are standing.

If the alignment looks slightly off

AR Sky View leans on the compass, and compasses are easily disturbed. The usual culprits are close at hand: car bodywork, railings, tripod heads, and magnetic phone mounts and cases, which are the worst offenders and the least suspected.

Step away from metal and swing the phone in a figure eight to recalibrate. If it is still not sitting right, nudge the heading manually until a known landmark lines up — the sun in daylight is the easiest reference there is. Once it is calibrated, everything projected through it moves together and stays locked as you turn.

Then commit to a time

Scouting with AR is what turns a maybe into a plan. Once you know the moon clears the ridge at 22:10 from this exact spot, save it as a shot plan so it comes back to you on the night instead of living in a screenshot you will not find again.

The numbers were always right. Standing there and seeing them on the actual horizon is what makes them useful.