Drag anywhere on the bar, or use the slider, to move the whole page to another hour of tonight.

Altitude in degrees blocked by trees, roofline, and neighbours, measured from where the scope actually sets up. Values in between are interpolated. An object below the mask for its compass bearing is treated as unavailable, not merely low.

Bearing	Blocked below

Magnification and true field are derived from the scope’s 2032 mm focal length — nothing here is hardcoded.

In the light path — anything switched on here is offered alongside the bare scope, not instead of it. Every magnification, true field and exit pupil on the page is recomputed from the effective focal length.

Out at that hour or at sunset, whichever is later, and in at the second one. Neither is gated on astronomical dark: in June dark does not arrive here until well after nine, and the Moon and the planets do not need it.

A ceiling, not a plan. The page spends those minutes only when something specific arrives late enough to be worth them — Saturn out of the pin oaks, a moonrise, a shadow transit, cloud breaking — and it prints what it bought. Set either to zero and the hour above becomes absolute.

Automatic means Sunday through Thursday between 20 August and 12 June: the shape of the Wake County calendar rather than the calendar itself. It cannot know about the teacher workday in October or the week of spring break, so on those weeks the override is not a convenience — it is the part that is right.

Scoring only counts dark hours inside this window. A night that clears at 3 a.m. is not a good night if you are asleep.

Sites. Each one carries its own coordinates, its own Bortle class and its own horizon mask, because the thing that decides what you can see from a lake access road is not the pin oak on the south side of the yard. The fields below edit whichever site is selected at the top of the page — the back yard.