Moon Alignment
Overview
Moon Alignment solves one of landscape photography’s most complex planning problems: working out the exact date, time, and camera position needed to photograph the moon rising or setting behind a specific subject, framed at a specific size in the image.
This feature uses Apex Lucis’s built-in ephemeris engine to calculate the moon’s position in the sky — no internet required.
Accessing Moon Alignment
Planning tab → Moon Alignment
Step 1 — Place Pins
A map appears with two pins:
- Camera Pin (Purple) — Your shooting position. Will default to the coords of a Location, or your current location.
- Subject Pin (green) — What you are photographing (the building, rock, tree, etc.)
Drag the pins to their positions. The bearing from camera to subject is calculated automatically.
Step 2 — Fine-Tune Configuration
On the second step you can
- Adjust the date range to be scanned to find the best results
- Change the Tolerances for the Moon’s Azimuth and Altitude
- Set the Max moon illumination
- What your ideal altitude of the moon would be
- The size of your Camera Sensor, focal length of Lens you are planning on using.
Step 3 — Results
Apex Lucis shows all time windows during the selected period when the moon will be aligned with your camera-to-subject bearing, including:
- Date and time of alignment
- Moon altitude at that moment (higher = moon appears higher in sky)
- Moon illumination percentage
- Moon phase name
Alignment Detail View Tap any result to see:
- The detail of the moon for that result
- An estimate of how big the moon would look through the view finder.
- Shooting Tips
Moon Frame Visualiser
Below the lens table, a visual representation shows how the moon will look in the frame for whichever lens is selected in the table above it — useful for deciding which lens to pack.
How to read it:
- The bordered rectangle represents your camera’s frame, gridded with rule-of-thirds lines.
- The white circle is the moon, drawn to scale as a percentage of the frame — a small dot means the moon will look tiny at that focal length, while a circle filling most of the frame means it will dominate the shot.
- The percentage and lens focal length are labelled beneath the moon, so you can compare lenses at a glance by tapping through rows in the table above.
