weewx-celestial

Watch the sky move — a live celestial page for WeeWX, updating on every loop packet.

Installation · Configuration · The Geocentric in your skin · Translating (i18n) · GitHub project

weewx-celestial ships a live celestial page (the bundled Celestial skin) built around a single panel: the Geocentric — Earth at the center, every body (sun, moon, the eight planets, Proxima Centauri) placed by compass bearing and log distance, the moon at its true phase, bodies below the horizon dimmed and dashed, and an hour-long motion trail behind every dot. Beside the dial, a roster gives each body an odometer distance readout that ticks between loop refreshes at the body’s true radial rate (Mercury can recede ~28 km every second while Saturn approaches at the same pace), plus the raw astronomical-unit value and the current altitude.

Everything on the page moves. The dial and roster update from loop-data.txt on every loop record (for the Vantage driver, every 2 seconds), and between refreshes the page derives each body’s rate of motion from consecutive packets and advances the readouts every second — re-anchoring to truth on the next packet, and freezing rather than inventing data if the feed goes stale.

The bundled sample report (Palo Alto, a July evening at 9:12 PM — the first-quarter moon high in the southwest trailing its wake, Mercury and Mars in the west, the freshly set sun dashed below the horizon, Proxima Centauri alone at the rim, and every odometer ticking):

The Celestial page

How it works

The live values are weewx-loopdata almanac fields: report almanac tags (computed by the registered almanac, ideally weewx-skyfield’s) that weewx-loopdata evaluates on every loop packet and publishes in loop-data.txt. One computation engine serves the report tags and the live page, so they always agree. This extension runs no service and computes nothing itself.

What installs:

The Celestial skin (the sample report), registered as CelestialReport.
The --migrate-loopdata-fields command-line utility (see upgrading).

The roster first-paints at report time from $almanac and then goes live from loop data. What you see depends on the almanac WeeWX has: with weewx-skyfield (stars on), everything, Proxima included. With PyEphem (no weewx-skyfield), everything except the Proxima Centauri row. With only WeeWX’s built-in almanac, the page generates but the panel stays empty and shows an install hint — the built-in almanac serves none of the positions or distances this page runs on, which is why weewx-skyfield is strongly recommended.

For sky charts — the sky dome, sun path, orrery, analemma, solar year, lunation and rise/set timeline — see weewx-skyfield’s own Sky page: as of 7.0 this skin no longer embeds them. weewx-skyfield is the atlas; weewx-celestial is the live instrument.

Requirements

Python 3.9 or later
WeeWX 5.2 or later
weewx-loopdata 5.0 or later
weewx-skyfield strongly recommended (required for Proxima Centauri), or PyEphem

License

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