Update 1.2 — Sky mode: the real sky over your home, day and night

New: Sky mode

Settings → View → Sky puts you on a hillside, looking up. It is the real sky for where you are and the time it is now - not a photo, not a loop.

• Your location - from Windows location, your time zone's city, or coordinates you type in.
• Day, twilight and night from the real Sun - blue noon, the orange band and the Earth's shadow at sunset, the stars coming out one by one, at the minute and in the direction they do where you live.
• A night like a long-exposure photograph - every naked-eye star from Hipparcos plus 68,000 fainter ones from Tycho-2, twinkling at their true brightness and colour, and the Milky Way from NASA's Gaia-based map.
• The Moon in its true place, size and phase, by day as well; eclipses of the Sun and Moon happen when they really happen; a comet shows only when a real one is in reach.
• Live aurora - near the poles, the curtains follow NOAA's real-time forecast.

Your weather, live

The sky has the weather you have. Every 15 minutes Orrery reads the forecast for your place from MET Norway, hour by hour:

• Real volumetric clouds - cumulus heaps kilometres tall with brilliant sunlit faces, shaded bases and hazy torn ends; altocumulus sheets and cirrus feathers above them, each deck at its real height and drifting with the real wind.
• Light that moves with the Sun - white at noon, cloud tops still glowing orange for minutes after your sunset, a dim soft grey at night.
• Rain, sleet and snow for the hour you are in, always falling from a cloud; snow settles into a white field and melts again when it warms up.
• Thunderstorms - lightning forks to the ground and lights the clouds from inside.
• Fog and the veil of a downpour swallow the far hills.

The request carries your position rounded to about a kilometre, nothing else. Settings → Live weather turns it off for a clear sky.

A landscape that lives

You stand in a meadow - grass blade by blade, with wildflowers, waving when the wind gets up and its tips catching the sun. Green-gold fields, hedges and woods run out to three ranges of hills, each paler in the haze than the one before. A farm, a village and an old windmill stand at their real size; their windows light up at dusk and go out one by one through the night.

A view that looks around by itself

• Follow the scene (the new default) - the view turns slowly toward what is worth seeing: a low Sun and the twilight glow, a bright Moon, the best stretch of the Milky Way - and keeps looking gently around once it gets there.
• Or a steady turn, slow, medium or fast, or stopped. Arrow keys on the bare desktop turn it by hand; a compass in the corner shows where you face.
• Time bar - press the track at the bottom right to see the sky up to 24 hours ahead, with the forecast's weather for that hour; Now brings it back.
• Pause and come back later - the sky carries on from where it stopped and glides back to the clock, no jump.

Now and then, something happens

Every few minutes (or more often, or never - Settings → Sky events): a shooting star, a meteor shower on its real dates, a fireball, a plane blinking across, a satellite pass, a rocket launch; by day birds, a hot-air balloon, a kite; bats at dusk, fireflies over the meadow on some nights. Each at its real speed, and only in the light it belongs to.

Festivals

On their real dates: fireworks for New Year (a show at midnight), Chinese New Year and Diwali; sky lanterns for Loy Krathong; pumpkins and bats for Halloween; a lit tree and a sleigh crossing the sky at Christmas.

Constellations, star names, day and night

One button, Star lines, steps through off, the twelve zodiac figures, and all 88 constellations. Label density switches between the brightest stars, the famous ones, and every named star. And the Day / Night button turns daylight on or off whatever the clock says - the stars stay exactly where they really are tonight.

Cabin mode

• Full view - one key puts the front window over the whole desktop; one key brings the cockpit back.
• The launch from Starbase now climbs through drifting cloud decks set by the day's weather, and the stack shakes at liftoff and through max-Q.

Thank you for flying with Orrery. If the sky over your home is on your desktop tonight, a short review is the single thing that helps it most.