The bottom bar makes Sky View a time machine: set any date and time, scrub through the night, watch the sky move in real time, and read a target’s whole night at a glance from the 24-hour timeline.
Date & Time Controls #
Year / Month / Day spinners set the date (arrows step, boundaries wrap correctly), and a row of jump buttons moves through time: -1d, -1h, -10m, +10m, +1h, +1d, plus Now to snap back to the present. The time display shows the site’s local time.
Live View #
The play button switches Sky View into real-time mode – the sky drifts exactly as it does outside, continuously updated. Pause holds the sky at the current instant. Combined with the Daylight Sky overlay it makes a beautiful office-window planetarium; more practically, it shows you exactly what is placed where right now before you step outside.
Reading the 24-Hour Timeline #
The timeline strip encodes the whole day:
- Background bands – daytime, civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight, and true night, each a progressively darker shade. Where the band goes black is where imaging time lives.
- Target altitude curve – a gray line tracing the framed coordinates’ altitude through the day (higher on the strip = higher in the sky).
- Minimum-altitude line – a red dashed reference so you can see when the target is above your working threshold.
- Now marker – a dashed white line at the actual current time.
- The scrubber – drag the thumb (or click anywhere) to set the time; the sky canvas, overlays, and daylight tint all follow live.
The Moon on the Timeline #
The moon button toggles a dashed moon altitude curve onto the timeline, and its label continuously reports the moon’s current altitude plus – when a target is framed – the separation between moon and target (e.g. “Moon 21° · 48° sep”). One glance answers the eternal question: is the moon going to be a problem for this target tonight? For the per-filter scheduling answer, see Moon Avoidance Profiles.