Description
Rewritten to carry the solar and aurora work, with all em and en dashes removed
Rewritten to carry the solar and aurora work, with all em and en dashes removed. Solar sits second so the new headline feature lands right after the pitch, and aurora follows it as the bridge back to night. Transit is a native macOS menu bar app that tells you what's happening in the sky, and whether it's worth going outside for. Whether you watch through an eyepiece or a camera, Transit gives you enough lead time to carry your gear out and let it settle before the moment arrives. The ISS passing overhead. Io casting its shadow across Jupiter. The Great Red Spot rotating into view. The Moon rising beside Saturn. A sunspot group worth uncapping the solar scope for. It all sits in a single glance in your menu bar, so you never miss what you'd have wanted to see. TONIGHT'S EVENTS, AT A GLANCE One click opens the whole night: rise, transit, and set times for every planet, Great Red Spot transits, Galilean moon events (shadow transits, occultations, eclipses), oppositions, conjunctions, lunar phase, moonrise, and satellite passes. Busy nights stay readable. Events group by planet, and a signature timeline maps the night from sunset to sunrise so you can read its shape at a glance. IS THE SUN WORTH SETTING UP FOR? The Sun, Moon & Sky panel answers the question solar imagers actually ask. A one line verdict sums up the day, "Good solar targets" or "Quiet Sun," and expanding it ranks the active regions as targets: where each one sits on the disk in plain words, how big it is, whether it's growing, decaying, or recently flaring, and its 24 hour flare probability. The top ranked target is labeled, and the full NOAA region list stays one click away. Data comes from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center as a daily snapshot, with its date always shown. AN AURORA FORECAST THAT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE Tonight's peak Kp forecast, interpreted for your geomagnetic latitude instead of handed to you as a raw number. An Alaska sky might read "aurora likely, possibly overhead." A Gulf Coast sky honestly reads "faint at best, a camera target." A quiet night simply says so. Always a probability, never a promise. NOTIFICATIONS THAT CHECK THE SKY FIRST An alert you can't act on is just noise. Every notification passes through gates you set once: your observing hours, a clear sky check, and minimum altitude and seeing thresholds. You're only pulled outside when an event is genuinely observable, clear, high enough, and inside the hours you keep. When the sky closes up, Transit goes quiet and shows a small cloud badge instead. THE CONDITIONS GATE A synthesized Conditions score (0 to 100) folds cloud cover, transparency, seeing, dew point spread, and moonlight into one honest go/no-go verdict, a combination no weather app makes. It's gated, not averaged. An overcast sky reads 0, full stop, because you can't observe through cloud. A separate Seeing score estimates atmospheric steadiness for planetary detail. COMPUTED ON YOUR MAC The astronomical core is calculated locally from a professional grade ephemeris and works offline: rise and set times, altitudes, Galilean events, oppositions, conjunctions. No account, ever. Only weather, satellite orbital data, solar and space weather, and the Great Red Spot's drifting longitude use the network, and they refresh themselves in the background. BUILT FOR THE MENU BAR Show both scores, one, or a quiet glyph. The footprint is yours. Promote separate icons for Conditions, Planets, Sun & Moon, or Satellites if you want them. State reads by shape, legible in light or dark mode and for colorblind users. Transit works for visual observers and imagers alike. No camera required. No subscription. A one-time purchase, yours forever. Part of the Mac Observatory suite of native macOS astronomy apps.
