The orrery

An orrery is an old clockwork model of the sun and its planets. In Zenith Calendar, the orrery is the picture the whole app is drawn in — a working model of your time. One canvas holds the sun, the year ring, the earth and the moon, and every commitment — one thing you have to do — as a body around them.

That same canvas becomes each of the five views: the year, the years, the day, the week and the month. Settings › "about" says it in one line: "the model is the calendar — a living orrery of your time."

#The centre

The sun holds the middle of the screen, set a little above centre. That way its wheel neither leaves the top empty nor crowds the words at the foot. The year ring runs round it, filling most of the screen's narrower side.

#Colours that follow your sky

The sun, the earth close up, the earth seen far off in the year, and the moon are the app's four fixed colours. Every one of them passes through the chosen sky — the app's colour theme. So a mono sky leaves no gold sun in a black-and-white world, and a coloured sky moves them along with everything else.

The accessibility strength dial does not reach them. That dial is for telling one almanac from another, and the sun is not an almanac.

There are ten skies. "clean", "mono" and "pastel" come with the app; the other seven are Gold. See Skies, colours & my sky.

#The year ring

Faint spokes mark the solstices and equinoxes. A thin oval is the orbit path.

Month ticks stand where each month of the chosen calendar system begins, with the month's name at its middle. So in a lunar calendar, the next new year can arrive before the ring closes. The system's own new year gets a stronger tick. See Calendar systems & names.

A month name that the live earth or moon would cover fades out of their way.

#The earth and the moon

Today's earth rides the ring at today's place, with the moon circling it at its true phase. They are drawn live only while the current year is showing.

Pick any other day and a faint ghost earth stands at that day, with a dimmer moon beside it. Both are doors. So a year you have travelled to still has a way into a day and a week. See Moving between the views.

While the earth is being spun through time, it becomes a full glowing body, and its moon is not drawn. See Scrubbing the ring & spinning time.

#One belt per almanac

Every almanac — a named, coloured layer of commitments — has its own belt of bodies outside the ring.

• One body per day. However much an almanac holds on a day, it shows one body, and notches the ring where that day crosses it. There are no exceptions. "celestial" and the two astrology almanacs are drawn like everything else.
• Distance comes from the binder. An almanac's belt starts further out the further down the binder — the page where your almanacs stand in order — it sits. See The binder.
• Width comes from how much it holds. A belt widens with how much the almanac holds in the year on screen.
• A belt, not a line. Each body sits its own fixed distance inside the belt, so the field reads as a scattered band.
• Room to grow. Adding almanacs grows the field outward rather than squeezing it.

Nothing is ranked by what it is or what it is called. Your order in the binder is what sets how far from the sun an almanac's bodies sit.

What a body's tail and ring mean is in What a commitment is.

#The eye

On every view, the eye, "view", can put repeating commitments out of sight without changing them. One choice reaches every view. See The eye — putting repeats away.

While the eye's "tasks" pill is on, a day holding a star Zenith Tasks has given a due date gets one small four-point star just inside the ring, at that day's place. It is not a body and stands in no belt. See The year & the years.

#Which way it turns

Settings › "time & directions" sets how the orrery runs:

• "the year is anchored to" — "the solstice" or "new year's day"
• "the year ring shows" — "calendar year" or "next 365 days"
• three switches: "reverse the year orbit", "reverse the earth's spin" and "reverse the moon's spin"

See Time & directions.

#Where the sky stands

On an upright phone, the sky fills the screen.

On an open fold or a tablet, without the docket (a side panel beside the sky) or the desk clock (a clock on a half-closed fold) — both Gold — the sky takes its own frame. It sits below the big date and above the taskbar, centred, and no wider than about three-quarters of its own height. The field of bodies stops inside the frame rather than running through the date.

On a phone held sideways, the frame starts to the right of "voice" and "add" and their words. It starts low enough that the field tops out at the foot of the date.

The year, the years and the day stand below the date. The week and the month keep the full height and clear the date on their own. During a dive — the animated move between views — the frame moves between the two, so nothing jumps.

Every touch is matched to the same frame the sky is drawn in, so what you tap is what is drawn there. See Folds, tablets & wide screens.

#See also.

The sky · The eye — putting repeats away · The year & the years · Skies, colours & my sky