weewx-skyfield
The Sky page
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Installing the extension also installs The Sky — a one-page, planetarium-style showcase
generated by the bundled Skyfield skin at <HTML_ROOT>/skyfield/index.html. Everything on
it is computed for your station’s location and elevation, taken automatically from
weewx.conf:
- a sky dome of everything above your horizon right now — the sun, the moon drawn at its true phase, the planets, and the bright IAU-named stars sized by magnitude, with hover coordinates on every mark (when the sun is up, the stars are shown dimmed, standing where they are behind the daylight);
- today’s rise & set ribbons for the sun, moon and planets, over civil/nautical/ astronomical twilight bands, with transit ticks and a “now” line;
- today’s sun path — the altitude/azimuth arc hour by hour, the moon’s path dashed beside it, over twilight-depth bands;
- the solar year — sunrise, sunset and solar noon for every week of the year over the twilight bands, with today marked;
- the lunar month — the current lunation as thirty phase discs, the principal phases dated, today’s disc ringed;
- an orrery of today’s heliocentric longitudes, viewed from above the ecliptic;
- an analemma — the sun’s altitude and azimuth at local standard noon for every week of the year, with this week’s point marked;
- moon phase and illumination, countdowns to the next equinox, solstice, new and full moon — and to the next eclipse visible from your station — Jupiter’s central meridian longitudes, Saturn’s ring tilt, the constellation each planet stands in, and a full almanac table.
The page is self-contained HTML and inline SVG — no JavaScript libraries, no web fonts, and nothing fetched at run time — so it requires nothing beyond what the extension already requires, works offline, and renders fine on a Raspberry Pi. It regenerates with live values every report cycle.
Every panel on the page can also be embedded individually in your own skin — see Using the Sky panels in your own skin.
Configuring the page
The page is generated via the [[SkyfieldReport]] entry that the installer adds under
[StdReport] in weewx.conf.
The theme option selects the page’s plate: dark (the default — the night plate), light
(a paper-atlas plate), or auto — light while the sun is up at the moment the page is
generated, dark otherwise. The page regenerates each report cycle, so the auto flip follows
sunrise and sunset within one archive interval; the colors are baked in at generation time,
still with no JavaScript.
[StdReport]
[[SkyfieldReport]]
theme = auto
It is the most computation-hungry page in a typical install (the solar-year chart runs several
hundred rise/set searches, the analemma evaluates the almanac 53 times). The
result cache absorbs most of that — the year-scale samples are
anchored to fixed instants and reused across cycles, so the full price is paid once at
startup, not every cycle. If the page is still too heavy for your hardware you can generate
it less often by setting report_timing in the [[SkyfieldReport]] section of weewx.conf.
To skip generating it entirely, set enable = false there.