Community Photo of the Week 🏆
Community Transit Photo
View gallery
Want your photo featured here?
Boosted Mode is the more advanced transit checker. It uses 3D geometry to compare the aircraft’s real position in the sky with the Sun or Moon, instead of relying only on a simple angle check.
It looks at the aircraft’s track, altitude, climb or descent, distance from you, data quality, and the apparent size of the Sun or Moon. This helps separate real transits, grazing passes, near misses, and loose sky candidates.
For serious transit hunting, the lower end gives you fine control from 0.1° to 4.0°. Smaller values are tighter, while larger values give you a broader heads-up area. These margins are warnings, not guarantees.
On by default — the original Boosted result is kept if refinement fails.
Uses Astronomy Engine, EGM96 height correction, atmospheric refraction, 0.05 s closest-approach timing, entry/centre/exit timing, uncertainty, turn/stability checks, and LOCKED / SHOOT / CANCEL status. No extra aircraft-provider requests.
Multiple aircraft detected at once are grouped into one email. Your email address is saved only in this browser and is not stored by Transit Chaser. Check spam or junk if an alert does not arrive.
Use a token from an active Flightradar24 API subscription. The token is used only in this tab and is not saved by the app.
Paste a temporary Cloudflare tunnel /data.json URL to check a dump1090 receiver. This does not replace the normal flight source or transit maths.
Transit Chaser is a free aircraft-transit photography project built by Sydney astrophotographer Rey Sandu Godakumbura. It grew out of years of manually watching flight paths, comparing aircraft positions with the Sun and Moon, testing angles in the field and trying to improve the chances of being ready for a transit that may last less than a second.
The app combines the observer's location with live community-supplied aircraft position data and the calculated position of the Sun or Moon. It compares those moving aircraft with the target in the sky and can warn about possible alignments. The app also includes a Location Planner, contrail and plane-on-plane modes, Plane Watch filters, adjustable detection margins and other tools for photographers who want to explore local aircraft traffic.
Transit Chaser does not claim that every alert will become a photograph. Aircraft can turn, climb, descend or disappear from a data feed, and different ADS-B networks can update at different times. The project is therefore tested against real observations and user reports, with the aim of improving a photographer's chances rather than presenting a safety-critical aviation service.
The Community Gallery contains original transit photographs submitted by photographers and manually reviewed before publication. The guides explain aircraft-transit photography, Sun and Moon shooting, solar safety, detection margins and the basic geometry used by the app. These pages document the project for people who want more than the live tracker itself.
How Transit Chaser works How to use the app Detection margin guide Photography guides Community Gallery About the project
Transit Chaser has become expensive to keep online. If the app has helped you, a quick follow on Instagram genuinely helps spread the word and keep the project growing.
Follow @clicksbyrey