Updates & Roadmap

How We Score the Sky breaks down the cloud model: the 13 pressure levels we pull from NOAA's GFS, how we check whether a cloud is actually lit by the sun rather than just present, and the moisture penalty that catches hazy skies a plain cloud-cover forecast would miss.

Interpreting the Cloud Score pairs that with real photos, four score ranges from blocked to great-to-perfect, so you know what a given number actually tends to look like before you head out.

The map has grown a lot of features over time, and not all of them are obvious on first use. The new Guide page walks through the sunset score, finding the best spots, base maps, the three modes, changing dates, and heatmap opacity, each explained next to a numbered screenshot of exactly where to find it.

It replaces the separate "How it works" and "What's new" links in the menu, which are now reachable from inside the guide instead.

Before this you could only move through the year with a slider. Now you can tap the date and pick a day straight from a calendar, which is much easier when you are planning around a trip or a specific weekend.

It works everywhere the date shows up: the desktop panel, the phone sheet, and the small date bar at the top of the phone screen. The map still snaps to the closest of 16 pre-computed sunset directions for that day, so it stays fast.

Finding a great spot only helps if you can get there. The score popup and the mobile sheet now have a Navigate button that opens turn-by-turn directions to the exact coordinates you picked.

On the phone it hands off to your device’s own “open with” chooser, so Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, Komoot, Strava, OsmAnd or whatever you use can take over. On the web you get Google Maps, Waze and Apple Maps directly, plus a share option and a copy-coordinates fallback for everything else.

In the Android app the system back button used to close the app when you did not expect it to. Now it goes back the way you would expect, for example from the eclipse explainer back to the map, and only closes the app once there is nothing left to go back to.

Search is one of the first things people try, so it got some work. You can paste latitude and longitude coordinates and go straight there. Text results are sorted by distance too, so the closest match shows first instead of a town with the same name in another country.

Picking a result also selects that exact point on the map and opens its score, which saves you a tap.

During the 12 August 2026 eclipse the sun sits very low in the sky. Standing inside the path of totality is not enough if a mountain or ridge is in the way.

This layer follows the terrain along the eclipse sight-line and shows where you will actually be able to see the eclipsed sun, not only where the moon’s shadow passes overhead.

We added pages in several languages for the 12 August 2026 total solar eclipse. They include an interactive demo of how terrain blocks the low sun, a section on watching an eclipse safely, and regional maps of the best cities to watch from.

Spain was added to eclipse mode, and coverage now follows the path of totality across Europe.

Switch the map into eclipse mode to explore the path of totality and find viewing spots for the 12 August 2026 total solar eclipse.

It uses the same terrain scoring, lined up with the eclipse’s sun direction, and adds the path-of-totality overlay along with per-city details like how much of the sun is covered and exactly when it happens where you are.

The cloud forecast now runs automatically at 10:00 and 16:00 UTC every day, using NOAA’s free global GFS weather model, and uploads to our servers with no manual steps. The forecast you see is always current.

We also smoothed the data so the overlay looks a lot less blocky across the map.

Not all clouds are equal at sunset. High, wispy cirrus catches colour and can make the sky spectacular, while thick low cloud or a hazy, moisture-heavy sky ruins it.

We added a boost for cirrus and a penalty for haze, plus a time slider so you can move across the hours around sunset. We also fixed a bug that showed the next day’s data by mistake.

City pages now recognise local-language names and alternate spellings across more than 16 countries, with automatic redirects to the main page and the local names shown in titles and listings.

So the map is easier to find whether you search for “Geneva” or “Genève”, “Munich” or “München”.

Scanning a big region for the best viewpoints can take a moment. It now shows a progress bar with a cancel button, so you are never left waiting or stuck.

The city pages picked up a colour-coded guide that explains every score tier, a distance slider with a radius circle to widen or narrow the search around town, and a tap-anywhere ring that shows the exact score at that point.

Behind the scenes we tightened things up: content-security and other protective headers, integrity hashes on scripts so nothing can be tampered with, rate limiting to prevent abuse, and an updated privacy policy.

Sunset Atlas stays free, with no signup and no personal tracking.

First-time visitors now get a short, skippable walkthrough of the essentials: reading the heatmap, moving through dates, finding the best spots nearby, and the how-it-works explainer.

Sunset Atlas arrived on the App Store and Google Play as native apps, with GPS location and native sharing built in.

A big part of that release was offline maps. Download a region to your device and keep finding sunset spots with no signal, which is handy on hikes, road trips and remote drives where the best skies usually are.

A How It Works page explains the scoring with interactive visuals: ray-casting the horizon, the vegetation filter, and the scenic factors.

A Share button lets you send a spot as a link, and the app now remembers your last location and date so you pick up where you left off.

We built pages for 1,287 cities, each one listing the best sunset viewpoints nearby.

So when someone searches for “sunset near {their town}”, they can find the map and land straight on the good spots around them.

Sunset Atlas started out as pure terrain scoring, but the perfect spot on a cloudy night is still a grey sky. This release added the weather side of things.

A physical cloud model estimates whether the sky will light up with colour or stay blocked, for tonight and tomorrow, across Western Europe. That way you can pick a spot with both a clear horizon and a promising sky.

Every location and date became a shareable link, so you can send a friend the exact spot and evening and they will open the map right there.

Sunset times are now worked out for each location instead of one regional time, and a small “buy me a coffee” tip jar was added for anyone who wants to support the project.

A perfect viewpoint is no good if you cannot reach it. The “find best spots” tool now knows about access, using OpenStreetMap data to favour viewpoints near roads, walking paths, or parking.

Sliders let you set how close to each you want to be, so the suggestions are places you can actually get to.

Two core features landed together: a locate-me button that centres the map on your position, and a “find best spots” search that scans a radius around any point and ranks the top viewpoints.

A circle shows the area that was searched, so the results always have context.

Sunset Atlas went online, with map tiles served globally so the heatmap loads anywhere, a phone-friendly layout, a data-saver mode for mobile connections, an app icon, and a contact form.

This was the first version anyone could actually use.

The foundation of everything. A heatmap scores the landscape at 30-metre resolution for how good the sunset view is, looking at terrain and horizon openness, vegetation that blocks the low sun, and scenic factors like water, cliffs and west-facing slopes.

Early versions quickly added several base maps, satellite imagery, a moving sun indicator, and day-by-day sunset directions through the whole year.