Note: this is a repetition of a suggestion I made on the contact form of the Telescopius website before I realized that this forum existed.
I’d love to see an additional display on the Targets page. This would be for long-term planning over a period of weeks to a year. To help choose which targets to aim for over this period I could see graphically which ones would be visible on which dates.
The graph would have the following attributes:
- Horizontal axis is a range of dates with a resolution of one day. Default would be one month starting with current date, but ideally there would be an option to set the start and end dates.
- Vertical axis is hours of the day, from noon on one day to noon on the next, centered on midnight.
- The hours of darkness would be plotted as a shaded area between curves for sunset and sunrise times. The curves could be actual sunset and sunrise, the start and end of astronomical darkness, or possibly a gradient as on the current altitude vs. time of day graphs. High precision is not important, so precession and nutation of the Earth’s axes wouldn’t necessarily have to be taken into account (unless the information is already computed for other graphs).
- For targets selected by the current filter settings, times when the filter criteria overlap with darkness would be shown as shaded patches. The most basic case could show the hours of darkness when a given target is above an altitude threshold each day. Showing the time when the target crosses the prime meridian each day would also be very useful.
Whether this would be displayed separately for each target, or all selected targets would be displayed on a single graph would be a design decision. The latter is more useful, as it would allow easy comparison of different targets’ availability, but it could get cluttered very fast. Having a checkbox next to each target so that they could be individually toggled on and off in the graph would be ideal.
I’d be happy to generate a few examples in Matlab if that would help.