The orrery

Explanation

The orrery — your year drawn as an orbit round the sun — is the picture the whole app is drawn in. It is one canvas holding the sun, the year ring, the earth and the moon, with every commitment — anything on your calendar, an event or a thing to do — as a body around them. The same canvas becomes each of the five views: year, years, day, week and month.

The sun

The sun holds the centre, a little above the middle of the screen. The year ring runs round it.

The year ring

Faint spokes mark the solstices and equinoxes. Month ticks stand where each month begins, with the month's name at mid-month. The months are those of the calendar system you chose, so in a lunar year the next new year can arrive before the ring closes.

The earth and the moon

Today's earth rides the ring at today's place. The moon circles it at its true phase: new moon toward the sun, full moon away from it. Both are drawn live only while the current year is showing. Any other picked day shows a faint ghost earth, which glows while you spin it through time.

Commitment bodies

Each almanac — one of your calendars, a named, coloured layer of commitments — shows one body per day, however much that day holds. The body notches the ring where its day crosses it. The celestial and astrology almanacs keep one body per event instead.

Yearly bodies sit in a belt outside the ring. Your own yearly stars sit nearest, big holidays next, lesser holidays wider, and the celestial sky farthest out.

Where the sky stands

The sky — the whole calendar screen — sits a little differently on each kind of screen:

An upright phone. The sky fills the screen.
A phone held sideways. The sky keeps the left 60%. The year, the years and the day stand in a frame below the big date and to the right of "voice" and "add" and their words, so the ring and the globe never run through them. The week and the month keep the full height and clear the date on their own. A flight between views moves the frame smoothly.
An open fold or a tablet. Upright or sideways, without the docket or the desk clock, the sky has its own frame below the big date and above the taskbar. It is no wider than about three-quarters of its height, centred, and clear of the top buttons. The docket — on a wide screen, the side panel beside the sky (Gold) — keeps its sky as it was.

Every touch is measured in the same frame the sky is drawn in, so what you tap is what is drawn there.

Which way it turns

Settings › time & directions sets how the orrery turns:

"the year is anchored to" — "the solstice" or "new year's day";
"the year ring shows" — "calendar year" or "next 365 days";
whether the year orbit, the earth's spin and the moon's spin are reversed.

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Last updated 2026-09-19

The orrery

#The sun

#The year ring

#The earth and the moon

#Commitment bodies

#Where the sky stands

#Which way it turns