I am enjoying a morning at home, as the rains finally arrived overnight and the weather is ugly outside, but such was not the case yesterday. The day dawned crystal clear and with the first hint of autumn. It was 39F on Admiral Road in Sax-Zim Bog at 6 am, and did not rise to 40F till after 7 am. I had an excellent morning, and enjoyed my route.

One very important aspect of any birding outing (or even just a longer hike in a local park) is knowing in advance where the sun will be located relative to your current or planned position. If you are visiting a new area, and slowly driving down a remote dirt road scanning for birds, if that road ends up tracking into the morning sun, your birding success will be poor. It is no fun on a birding hike or slow drive in your car to be staring directly into the sun. It makes it darn hard to see anything.

While I use an advanced app on my phone and tablet called PlanIt for Photographers, which allows me to not only know the sun’s and moon’s location on any given day (and time), or additional items like planning milky way photographs for a given time of night and learning where truly dark night time skies are located (and much more) … for most people an app of this nature is overkill. Thus in this post I am reviewing a free service you may use on computer (not phone) that easily allows you to plan your own outings, and is free! The service is named SunCalc.Org.

SunCalc allows the user to accomplish the basics, but arguably the most important task … where will the sun be located relative to a given (or expected) location at some time in the future.

SunCalc.Org (basic or entry screen upon loading web page)

The Red Arrows and White Numbering & Text are my Annotations!

Map Layers

Zoom In and Out & Location

Time of Day Slider

Select Date

Selected Menu Options

Once again, SunCalc provides only the basics, but it does a good job and has an easy to learn interface. Happy birding.