# On-screen features · SunScope
The interactive parts of SunScope beyond the table — the sky scope, day-strip weather icons, weather-event banners and popups, and the What's Coming cosmic events almanac.

# On-screen features

The interactive bits around the forecast table.

## The sky scope

The large circular visualisation at the top of the page shows the sky conditions. The sky colour smoothly interpolates through a full set of elevation-keyed gradients — from deep pre-dawn navy through golden sunrise, bright midday blue, warm sunset amber, and back to night — with a sun disc whose glow radius and intensity scale with the shortwave radiation at that moment. It's a live weather simulation, not just a colour wheel: cloud, rain, snow, and haze are all rendered from the forecast, so the scope actually looks overcast, wet, or misty when the weather is. By default it tracks the real current time and refreshes automatically alongside the forecast.

## Day-cycle time-lapse

Press the Day cycle play button (▶) on the scope to run a 24-hour time-lapse. SunScope drives the scope smoothly through the next 24 hours — roughly 15 simulated minutes per real second, so a full day plays out in about a minute and a half — animating the sky gradients, the sun's rise and fall, and the evolving weather as cloud rolls in, rain starts, or fog lifts. A live clock label shows the simulated time as it plays; press again to stop and snap back to now.

## The draggable timeline

Below the scope sits a 24-hour timeline bar. Its background is a gradient built from the actual per-hour sky colours across the coming day, so the bar itself previews how the sky will shift from dawn to dusk. Sunrise (↑) and sunset (↓) markers sit at their real times on the bar, with clock ticks at the quarter points. Grab the thumb and scrub to any instant to jump the scope — and the "why it feels like this" breakdown — to that moment, with everything interpolated smoothly between the hourly rows rather than snapping.

## Day strip weather and temperatures

Each day tab in the date selector shows the day's forecast at a glance: a weather icon representing the dominant daytime conditions (sun, cloud variants, or precipitation), plus the day's high and low SunSoak felt temperatures in warm and cool colours. The icon uses the actual daytime solar elevation and cloud category data, so it reflects the real character of the day rather than a generic symbol.

## Profile picker

The profile and settings picker lives in a popup opened from the nav bar, organised into Common, Places, Activities, and Work tabs. Alongside the profile buttons it holds the relevant config selectors for whatever you've picked — Solar Model, Vehicle type and road speed, Building type, Fur colour, Fitzpatrick skin type for burn time, and Pollen type — all in one place rather than spread across the column bar. The day-tab date strip also adapts to the active profile, showing vehicle, indoor, or pet-relevant highs and lows where appropriate.

## Today at a Glance

A summary panel above the table pulls together the 4–5 numbers that matter most for the day and your active profile — peak heat window, rain risk, wind, UV, and similar — so you don't have to scan the full hourly table to get the headline picture. Content adapts to what you're actually doing: the Farming profile adds sow and harvest advice from a seasonal crop calendar, for example. Every profile also gets a vs seasonal average comparison, showing how the day's high and 24-hour mean stack up against the 1991–2020 climate normal for that date and location — an honest anomaly check on top of the raw forecast numbers.

## Weather event banners and popups

When notable conditions are forecast — a frost, strong winds, fog, or a heat event — a banner appears above the forecast table with a brief alert. Wind banners classify conditions from Strong Breeze through to Violent Storm using standard Beaufort categories. Tapping or clicking the event icon opens a detailed popup explaining what the condition means and what to watch out for. Multiple events can appear at once.

## What's Coming — cosmic events almanac

A 🔭 panel below the forecast table shows upcoming astronomical events for your location over the next 90 days: meteor showers, lunar and solar eclipses, planetary conjunctions, and oppositions. Each entry shows the event name, peak date, a countdown, a short description, and a visibility note where the event is better from a particular hemisphere or location. When a cosmic event is currently active, it also appears as a banner above the forecast table alongside the weather alerts.

For how the numbers behind these features are calculated, see SunSoak & the science and the column reference.