Edwins wiki

In the city you do not see the night sky very well. Only the brightest stars are visible. And because you do not see the whole sky from between the buildings you have little reference to know what you are looking at. To know where the planets are in the sky a map would be handy. Using a raspberry pi, an e-ink display and the impressive skyfield python library is made a small map which updates automatically.

Every fifteen minutes cron starts a sall python script which computes where in the sky the planets are, seen from my Amsterdam location. It then plots plots the planet symbols on the map of the sky. It computes the next rise time of the planets which are under the horizon and lists those planets, with the next rise time, on the left side of the map. At the bottom of the screen are the cardinal directions in red: east (o=oost), south (z=zuid) and w for west. On the right side the time for which the is computed is shown and the illuminated part of the Moon (☾) and Venus (♀) in percent. For the planet symbols i used the TeX cmastro metafont. I call it eise after the builder of the most beautiful planetarium in the world.