This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
Product upvotes vs the next 3
Waiting for data. Loading
Product comments vs the next 3
Waiting for data. Loading
Product upvote speed vs the next 3
Waiting for data. Loading
Product upvotes and comments
Waiting for data. Loading
Product vs the next 3
Loading
lighthours
The best light of the day, as a calendar subscription
lighthours works out the daily golden hour and blue hour for any place on earth and hands them over as a calendar you subscribe to once. No app to open, no account, no ads, no tracking. Open source and self-hostable.
Hi Product Hunt,
I'm a photographer, and the problem I kept having is a small one: the best
light of the day lasts about an hour, it moves by a minute or two every day,
and every tool that tells you when it happens is an app you have to remember
to open. I never remembered.
So lighthours is the version that doesn't need opening. You type a place — a
city, an address, a postcode, never coordinates — and you get an iCal feed.
Golden hour and blue hour then show up in whatever calendar you already use,
next to the shoots you already have booked. It's a rolling subscription, so it
tops itself up and never runs out.
Two things I got stubborn about:
Accuracy. Sun position is the full NOAA algorithm including atmospheric
refraction, so it works with the apparent altitude — where the sun actually
appears — rather than the geometric one. Near the horizon that's about two
minutes, which is exactly where it matters. I checked it against an
independent implementation across a full year at six locations from Reykjavík
to Sydney: mean deviation 0.9 seconds over 12,709 comparisons. Near the poles,
phases that don't exist are left out rather than given an invented time.
Longevity. It's plain PHP and vanilla JS — no database, no build step, no
dependencies. A folder you upload to the cheapest hosting you can find, MIT
licensed. That's deliberate: I wanted a free tool that can outlive my interest
in maintaining it. If I lose interest, anyone with five euros of webspace
still has it.
On the business model, since it's the fair question: there isn't one. No
accounts, no ads, no tracking, no email required, no paid tier planned. The
sun's position is a pure calculation, so there's no API to pay for and nothing
to store — running it costs me a few euros a year. There's a coffee link in
the footer and that is the entire extent of it.
I'd love to hear where it gets things wrong. The failure mode I can't find on
my own is a location where the times are simply off — so if you try your own
and something looks wrong, that's the most useful thing you could tell me.
About lighthours on Product Hunt
“The best light of the day, as a calendar subscription”
lighthours was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 0 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #137 on the daily leaderboard. lighthours works out the daily golden hour and blue hour for any place on earth and hands them over as a calendar you subscribe to once. No app to open, no account, no ads, no tracking. Open source and self-hostable.
On the analytics side, lighthours competes within Productivity, Photography, Calendar and GitHub — topics that collectively have 874.8k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how lighthours performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted lighthours?
lighthours was hunted by 3pixelhoch. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of lighthours including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
3pixelhoch