Sky events
A tab listing what is coming up in the sky over your station: eclipses, meteor showers, planets at their best, supermoons, equinoxes and solstices, filtered to what is visible from your coordinates.
The Sky events tab answers one question for your station's coordinates: what is the next thing in the sky worth going outside for. It is a chronological list, soonest first, and every entry on it can actually be seen from where your station stands.
Like the Astronomy tab, it is computed from your station's latitude and longitude with no external service involved. It needs nothing more than a location.
What is listed
| Event | What is shown |
|---|---|
| Solar eclipse | The next one visible from your station, with the kind it takes here (total, annular or partial), how much of the sun is covered at maximum, and when. |
| Lunar eclipse | The next one during which the moon is above your horizon, with its kind (total, partial or penumbral) and how much of the moon is in shadow. |
| Meteor showers | The next four whose radiant rises at your latitude: peak night, how high the radiant gets, meteors an hour under ideal skies, and how much moonlight will compete. |
| Planets | One entry per planet from Mercury to Saturn: opposition for the outer planets, greatest elongation (evening or morning sky) for Mercury and Venus, with how high it gets around midnight or its angle from the sun. |
| Supermoon | The next full moon within a day of a perigee under 362,000 km. |
| Season | Whichever of the next equinox or solstice comes first. |
A solar eclipse entry carries the reminder that the sun must never be viewed without a certified solar filter; everything else on the list is safe to watch with the naked eye.
Only what you can see from here
The filtering is the point of the tab. An eclipse on the far side of the planet, a meteor shower whose radiant never clears your horizon, a planet that stays below it: those are left off rather than listed with a "not visible" badge. A visitor asking what is next means what they can see.
The same rule shapes what is said about an event. A solar eclipse is reported as it happens over your horizon, so a station outside the path of totality is told "partial" with its own coverage figure, not the eclipse's headline kind.
Two things are deliberately absent. Uranus and Neptune reach opposition every year but never become a naked-eye sight, so they are not announced. Micromoons are left out for the same reason in reverse: there is nothing to see.
Dates and times
Every event is given with the date and time of its peak, in your station's time zone; a lunar eclipse also notes when the moon sets if that falls during the eclipse. Meteor shower peaks are resolved for the current year from the shower's position along the Earth's orbit rather than from a fixed calendar date, because a peak drifts by up to half a day from one year to the next.
Meteor showers, planets, supermoons and seasons are searched about a year ahead, eclipses further, since a visible one can be years away. If nothing qualifies, the tab says so rather than padding the list.
Turning it on or off
The tab is on by default for any station with coordinates. Toggle it under Panels → Tabs & sections → Sky events. Without coordinates the switch is greyed out; see the Forecast page for how to set a location on each kind of station.
Next steps
- Sun & moon: where the sun and moon are right now
- Tabs & panels