See the Moon on Any Date: Two Weeks Free, Any Date With Pro | Selene

The short answer

Selene lets you move the moon through time rather than reading it off a row. Drag the date scrubber and the moon disc, its arc across the sky and the colour of the sky behind it all update together: as the evening deepens the backdrop moves from a warm band on the horizon to near-black, and the orb slides along the arc it would really have crossed that night.

The free window is two weeks either side of today. Drag past that edge and Selene offers Pro, which extends the window as far into the past or future as you keep pulling.

What most competitors get wrong is what sits outside the paywall: the full month calendar, every phase, moonrise and moonset times, the twelve folk moon names and the new-moon nights are free forever. What Pro charges for is reach — how far from today you can go.

Why a date is the question people actually have

Almost every moon app on the App Store assumes you want to know about tonight, and treats every other date as a lookup in a frozen table. That breaks the moment the question changes: you are booking a night shoot three weeks out, checking a past date against a photo you took, planning a trip where the sky that matters is not the one you are in, or asking whether next month's total lunar eclipse falls on a night you will be awake.

These are all the same question — what will the moon be doing, and will it be visible, on a given date — and a row of numbers answered to you last night does not help with any of them. A row answers what phase. It does not answer where in the sky, how high, at what time, or whether the clouds will be there. Selene treats the date as a position on a track you can move along, and the whole night recomputes as you move it.

What you get in the free window, exactly

The scrubber opens with 29 day chips, two weeks either side, today centred. Within that window:

• The moon disc morphs as you scroll. Illumination is interpolated between adjacent days, so the lit fraction changes continuously under your thumb rather than snapping when the scroll settles.
• The trajectory line morphs with it. Each day's arc is precomputed and the path between two days is blended, so the curve bends and shifts as you scroll.
• The sky gradient is driven by the sun, not a clock. The backdrop follows the sun's altitude through five anchored tones — daylight blue, an orange horizon glow, civil purple, deeper blue, and near-black below 18° under the horizon — so scrolling past sunset visibly darkens the strip. It is a calculated quantity, not a dimmer.
• Rise, transit and set follow the date. Moonrise, the highest point and moonset are solved for that day at your location.

The gate is only at the edge of the window.

Why the free window is two weeks and not "today only"

This is the design decision most worth knowing about, because it is the exact thing competitors charge for. The loudest complaint in this category is that changing the date is behind the Pro wall; an app that shows you tonight, then asks for money the moment you look at tomorrow reads as a bait-and-switch, and people uninstall rather than subscribe.

Selene's answer is to give the window for free and put the wall where the effort genuinely grows: two weeks covers the "what is the moon doing around this weekend" and "what did I photograph last Tuesday" cases; past that you are planning at a horizon where more reach actually saves work. The Pro wall is opened by your own overpull — you drag past the last chip — so it appears at the moment you have already decided the feature is useful. It is never opened by the first-run path.

There is also no trial to reason about: Annual and Lifetime unlock exactly the same things, and the free calendar and tonight's verdict stay free whether or not you upgrade, so you can judge the app fully before spending anything.

The calendar behind the scrubber, and what it will not tell you

The month grid is the part that stays free. Every cell is the moon's real illumination for that day, with adjacent-month days dimmed and today outlined; tapping a date in the current month opens its detail. Above the grid, each month's new and full moon dates appear with the full moon's traditional name:

These are the conventional North American folk names for the full moon in each month, and Selene labels them as such.

There is an honesty note worth making. The new and full moon dates in the highlights card are not a high-precision root-find; they are read off the month's daily illumination values — the darkest day called new, the brightest called full — accurate to about ±1 day. The next-new and next-full times shown while you scrub are solved properly, by scanning the moon's angular distance from the sun for the next 0° or 180° crossing in six-hour steps and refining, precisely because a full moon off by a day is the most criticised error in this category.

The eclipse radar, and its horizon

Some dates are not just a phase; they are the date. Selene's rare-event radar carries total lunar eclipses from NASA's Five Millennium Catalog — the published list for 2001–2100 — so the dates and totality lengths are catalogued values rather than something the app estimates from its own low-precision ephemeris. Four are currently bundled: 3 March 2026 (58 minutes), 31 December 2028 (71), 26 June 2029 (102) and 20 December 2029 (54). Each has a detail page with the peak time in your local time zone and a reminder you can set, with the lead time adjustable. If an eclipse's moment has already passed, the reminder button says so.

Two limits are worth stating plainly. First, the catalog is a list, not a computation. Second, and more subtle: cloud cover is forecast ten days out. Scrub beyond about a week and a half and there is no weather data, so Selene's verdict on those days is "astronomy only, no weather source" — phase, position, arc and rise/set stay exact, but the "worth stepping outside" call is held back rather than invented. For an eclipse three years out that is the correct answer; an app that claims it will be clear is guessing.

What Selene does differently, and where it stops

Selene's difference is that the calendar is not the product. In apps that put changing the date behind Pro, the calendar is the bait and time travel is the upsell. Selene inverts that: the entire month, every rise and set, all twelve names and tonight's verdict are permanent free features, and only the distance from today is monetised. If your need stops at two weeks — which covers most people most of the time — you will never see the paywall.

The scrubber is the app's flagship interaction rather than a settings dropdown: the orb glides and the arc morphs continuously, snapping to a day only when your thumb lets go. Behind that, the astronomy is computed on-device with no account and no tracking, and the AR frames used to find the moon are processed on the device and never uploaded.

The honest limits, in one place:

• Precision is consumer-grade, not navigational. Selene uses Meeus's mean-element moon position with only the largest perturbation term, which puts the angular error at a few tenths of a degree. That is plenty for a phase, a compass direction and an AR overlay, and it is not a surveying instrument. Rise and set times inherit the same class of accuracy.
• The horizon is real. Pro extends the date window as far as you pull, but weather-based visibility stops at ten days, so far-future and past days are astronomy-only by design.
• The calendar highlight dates are ±1 day accurate by the display shortcut described above, while the scrub-phase times are properly solved.
• One location at a time unless you buy Pro. Arc, rise/set and verdict are computed for a single saved location; multiple locations is a Pro feature, which matters when planning a trip.

Deciding whether this is for you

If your question about the moon is ever more than a couple of nights from tonight, the free window is the thing to try first: open the scrubber, drag a fortnight forward, and see whether a date you care about answers cleanly. If a month grid that never sits behind a paywall is the deal-breaker you have heard other apps fail on, Selene takes that off the table by design.

If you plan beyond two weeks — a photographer booking next season, a traveller chasing an eclipse — Pro is where the reach is, and Lifetime is listed below the annual subscription, so buying once is cheaper than a single year of the subscription. Either way, the calendar never changes tier, and everything is computed on your device with no account involved.

For the shorter version: whether tonight is worth going outside for, finding the moon with AR, and reading the full month are covered on their own pages; the scrubber above is the one that answers the date question.