Transit: Astronomical Events

Beschreibung

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. All of it in a single glance in your menu bar. TONIGHT'S EVENTS, AT A GLANCE One click opens the whole night: rise, set and best altitude for every planet, Great Red Spot transits, Galilean moon events (shadow transits, occultations, eclipses), oppositions, conjunctions, lunar phases and occultations, meteor shower peaks, lunar and solar eclipses visible from your site, and satellite passes, including the ISS or Tiangong crossing the Sun or Moon. Busy nights stay readable: events group by object, and a timeline maps the night from sunset to sunrise. THE WEATHER SCORE, AND TONIGHT HOUR BY HOUR One number, 0 to 100, built from cloud, humidity, dew point spread and wind. It's gated, not averaged: an overcast sky reads overcast, full stop. The Moon isn't in it; when it's bright enough to wash out faint targets, Transit says so on its own line. An hourly outlook for the night picks out the best window, and a small curve of it sits beside the score in your menu bar. Weather from Apple Weather. IS THE SUN WORTH SETTING UP FOR? 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 sits on the disk in plain words, how big it is, whether it's growing, decaying or recently flaring, and its flare probability. From NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, with its date always shown. AN AURORA FORECAST THAT KNOWS WHERE YOU LIVE Tonight's Kp forecast, interpreted for your geomagnetic latitude, not 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." 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 a minimum altitude. Mute a planet and it stays in the panel without ever pinging. When the sky closes up, Transit goes quiet and shows a small cloud badge (yours to turn off). TWO DESKTOP WIDGETS Next Up shows the next event worth going outside for, with a live countdown. Solar shows today's Sun as seen by NASA's SDO. COMPUTED ON YOUR MAC The astronomical core runs locally from a professional grade ephemeris and works offline. Use your Mac's location or pin a fixed observatory, with times in the site's own zone. Only weather, satellite orbits, and solar and space weather data use the network. No account, no tracking. BUILT FOR THE MENU BAR Show the score, the score with tonight's curve, or a quiet glyph. Or promote separate icons for Conditions, Planets, Sun & Moon or Satellites. State reads by shape, legible in light or dark mode and for colorblind users. Units and the clock follow your region. IN YOUR LANGUAGE Users asked for Transit in their own language, so alongside English it speaks German, Italian, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. I wrote the translations with AI, and one of my users has checked the German line by line; the others haven't had that pass yet. If a phrase doesn't make sense, send me a screenshot and what you'd say instead, and I'll get it into the next version. It's my way of supporting the people who have supported the app, in the order of where Transit has been bought. 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.

Add a place by name or on a map Settings now has Add Site: search for a town, or click the map where you want to be, and Transit fills in the coordinates for you. You can still type them yourself, and the site is saved with its name so it's one click away in the panel's location menu. Also in this update: - The Solar widget keeps showing the Sun when NASA's "latest" image stops updating, by taking the newest picture from NASA's own archive. - The aurora line says when the forecast was last checked. - Tonight's best observing window is stated once, not twice. - Turning on diagnostics now keeps the recent history from before you turned it on, so the first time a problem happens can be seen. Nothing is written to disk until you turn it on. - The solar filter reminder can be dismissed, and turned back on in Settings. - Italian: Davor Orel's latest review is in, and the graph-only menu bar format is called "graph" in every language. - Smaller fixes to the timeline's tick marks and to the header when there is no location yet.

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Anbieter

Andrew Burwell

Kategorie

Reference

Version

1.5.7

Erfordert

iOS 15.0+

Größe

13.4 MB

Altersfreigabe

4+