Name: The Planets (widget/glance)
Rating: 3.5 (13 reviews)
Author: flug32

THE PLANETS is planetarium Glance & Widget for your Garmin smart watch. It shows positions of sun & planets in the sky currently & moving forward/backward by minutes, hours, days, years, or many years. Includes sun & moon and all naked-eye planets plus (optionally) Uranus, Neptune, Pluto & Ceres.

It's a planetarium & naked-eye/binocular astronomy viewing guide on your wrist: What is up tonight or right now? at a glance.

Works great on all devices testing, including many older devices, Instinct 2, Edge & GPS devices, as well as newer watches with color screens.

TIP: Just looking at the glance tells you which planets will be up after sunset/before sunrise. Opening the Widget gives the visual overview & allows you to move forward or backward in time by hours, days, or weeks.

Additional markings on the Widget Solar Clock view show sunrise, sunset, moon phase, season - solstice, equinox - as seen from your location today and tonight, all viewable at a glance.

This is the glance/widget version of The Planets (search for the App version, which has even more options & views).

BUTTONS

START starts & stops time. (To prevent inadvertently wasting battery, the Widget will run for 1 minute only, then stop. Just press START again if you want to see more.)
UP/DOWN move time forward/backward OR, if time is STARTED, makes time move faster/slower
BACK moves to 2nd screen (time increment 24 hrs) and then EXITS
MENU allows you to change several options & see help/planet abbreviations, including: Show more or fewer planets, make planet size larger or smaller, show planet labels or not, view help tips & planet abbreviations.
TO EXIT: Press BACK 2X.
HOW THE GLANCE WORKS

Glance shows a two-line summary of which planets are up in the evening (P:) and the morning (A:).

The Widget shows the ecliptic with all the visible planets (or some additional planets, including Neptune, Uranus, Pluto & Ceres) as a solar clock. You can instantly see which planets are up now, and then UP/DOWN/START to move time ahead or back and see what will be up later tonight or in the morning. Or next week, next month, next year, next century, or millenium.


Watch tonight's sky, or the outer Solar System over the next 4000 years, unfold in beautiful animations and graphics.

BATTERY The Widget is designed to be very sparing of battery usage. Obviously if it is running and calculating planet positions every day for the next year, that uses some battery - that is why it auto-stops after one minute: To prevent you from accidentally leaving it running for hours on end, which would run down the battery.

But when it is stopped, it uses practically no battery. It will update once per minute to update the time - much like a watchface - and to update planet & sun positions to reflect the time time & date. But in between that once-per-minute update it uses essentially no battery.

TIP: Top-bottom of Large Circle are Solar Noon Midnight (marks).

TIP: Horizontal moving marks are the HORIZON - anything above them is visible in the sky at that moment. Moving upper mark is the MERIDIAN, highest point of the ecliptic at your location right now.

TIP: The Large Circle represents the ECLIPTIC, the apparent path of the Sun & Planets across the sky.

TIP: Planet positions are accurate to 1.2 deg for the period 2000BC to 6000 AD.

TIP: The Solar Clock can run forward or backwards tens, hundreds, and even thousands of years. Set a time increment of weeks or months and watch how the Sun, sunrise/sunset/dawn/dusk marks, horizon, Solstice & Equinox marks (indicating seasons) all move over longer time spans.



