Almanac

The sun and moon for one place. Sunrise, sunset, how long the day is and whether that is more or less than yesterday, the twilights either side, and the moon drawn at its actual phase. Every number is computed from published astronomical series on the machine it runs on — there is no API and no key.

Live demo →Setup Put it on a screen

Almanac on the dawn ground: sunrise and sunset set large, day length beneath them, and a horizontal band shading from night through twilight into daylight with a mark for now. — DawnThe day as one band, midnight to midnight.

Almanac on the night ground showing a December solstice: a short blue daylight band between long dark evenings, and the note that the day is the same length as yesterday. — NightA December solstice, when the day stops shortening.

Where the numbers come from

Nowhere. Solar and lunar positions come from published series, and rise and set times are found by scanning altitude and bisecting each crossing — no network request of any kind.

If you self-host

Self-hosted, read-only container, no database and no volumes. It works on a machine with no internet at all.

What it wants

A latitude, a longitude and a timezone. Above the Arctic circle it says the sun does not set today rather than printing a nonsense time.

Setup

Put Almanac on a screen.

A browser is genuinely enough — the Mac app and Fully Kiosk below are conveniences, not requirements.

Any screen

nothing to install

Open the display in whatever browser the screen already has.
Go full screen: F11 on Windows and Linux, ⌃⌘F on macOS.
Or give it a browser of its own, which is what a dedicated panel wants: chrome --kiosk <url> — on macOS, open -a "Google Chrome" --args --kiosk <url>.
Turn off display sleep in the machine’s power settings and walk away.

Mac desktop

LivingKiosk app

Get the app and its install steps at livingkiosk.com/mac. It isn’t notarized yet, so macOS asks you to approve it once.
Menu bar → Library… and pick a display for each screen.
Configure… on any screen for its reload schedule, dim, and saved configs.

See the Mac app →

Wall tablet

via Fully Kiosk

On any Android tablet, install Fully Kiosk Browser.
Settings → Web Content → Start URL: the display’s address.
Under Device Management, keep the screen on and set a dim schedule so it isn’t glaring at 3am.
Turn on Start on Boot so a power blip brings the display back by itself.

fully-kiosk.com →

Displays are ordinary web pages, so anything that can hold one open works: a Raspberry Pi on a monitor, a retired iPad, a Fire tablet, the browser built into a TV.

Configuration

URL parameters.

Everything below, plus a live preview and a URL builder that writes the link for you, is at almanac.livingkiosk.com/setup.

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`lat, lon`	server default	Both or neither.
`place`	the coordinates	What to call it.
`tz`	server default	An IANA zone — decides what "today" means.
`theme`	dawn	`night`. Neither follows the system colour scheme.
`clock`	24	`12`.
`band`	on	The twilight band.
`moon`	on	Show the moon.
`dim`	0	Black scrim over everything, `0` to `0.8` (fleet-wide convention).

Almanac is open source under the MIT licence. Run it yourself with one command. The source opens to the public soon.