User Guide

Authoring

The heart of authoring is simple: capture the sky exactly as it looks right now. Compose a sky with the usual controls — pick a place on the globe, set the time, aim the camera, and tune the display (constellation lines, light pollution, and so on). When it looks right, press + Capture. That whole moment is recorded as one step.

Start a tour with New tour in the tour panel. The editing strip appears at the bottom of the screen, and each captured step shows up as a card. Change the place, time, or camera, capture again, and repeat — the skies you want to show stack up in order.

Hover a card (or select it on a phone) to reveal a small toolbar. Overwrite with the current view replaces that step with whatever is on screen now. Duplicate makes a second copy of the step — handy for nudging it slightly into the next scene. Step settings controls how the view moves, and Delete removes the step.

Drag cards to reorder them. The + at the end of the row adds a new step, just like + Capture.

Timing & transitions

How does the view move from one step to the next? You decide in each card’s Step settings. The setting describes how playback moves into that step.

There are four ways to transition. Auto is hands-off: it picks the best motion from the differences with the previous step (the default). Cut switches instantly under a brief fade to black. Slew keeps the place and time fixed and swings only the camera, smoothly. Time-lapse moves the camera while turning the sky along with it, showing time passing. Transition length sets how many seconds that motion takes (Cut has no length). Note that any step where the place changes always transitions with a fade, for technical reasons.

Dwell is how long playback rests on the step. Choose ∞ hold and it stays until you advance it yourself. Time flow while dwelling lets you run or freeze the sky’s clock during the pause: Frozen holds the sky still, while a faster rate lets you watch the stars drift, right there.

Changes apply at once, so you can keep editing and check the motion as you go. Press Done to close the panel.

Playback

Press ▶ Play in the editing strip, or ▶ Play on a saved tour, to begin. During playback a transport bar appears at the bottom and everything else fades quietly away, leaving only the sky.

The bar shows your progress through the steps. Previous step and Next step move between them; Pause / Resume stops and continues. Fullscreen fills the screen, and Exit leaves the tour. On an ∞ hold step, the Next button softly pulses, waiting for your cue.

You can always look around freely, even during playback. Dragging or swiping to change your view while dwelling does not stop the tour. If you interact during a transition, though, that motion is interrupted and playback pauses — press Resume to carry on from there.

The keyboard works too: Space to pause and resume, ← → for the previous and next step, and Esc to exit. When the tour reaches the end, you can choose Replay or Exit.

Saving & export

The tour you are editing is autosaved as a draft. Closing the editor does not lose it — the next time you open the tour, you pick up where you left off.

When it is ready, press Save in the editing strip. The tour joins your library and appears in the tour panel’s list, where you can play, edit, export, share, or delete it at any time.

Saved tours live only in this browser on this device. To carry one to another device — or to keep a reliable copy — use Export to save the tour as a single JSON file. To bring one back, use the import button in the tour panel, or drag and drop the file onto the panel.

A storage meter sits at the bottom of the tour panel. You have roughly 5 MB to work with; a warning appears as it fills up, so exporting and then deleting tours you no longer need keeps things comfortable.

Sharing

You can let others watch the tours you make, in one of two ways: share by link, or share by file.

For a small tour, Copy share link is the easiest. The whole tour fits inside the URL, so sending that link is all it takes. As tours grow, the URL can become too long to open reliably everywhere — in that case, hand over the exported file instead (the recipient opens it with import). You can also turn the draft you are editing into a link with Share this draft.

Opening a shared link brings up a small invitation card. It shows the tour’s title and step count, and pressing ▶ Start tour begins playback. Close returns to the ordinary sky.

On a phone

On a phone you can do everything — create, play, and share tours. The flow is the same as on a computer; only the look of the controls changes a little.

The step cards in the editing strip scroll sideways. Tap a card to select it, and a row of actions appears beneath it: ▲▼ to reorder, ✎ for settings, ⧉ to duplicate, and 🗑 to delete. Use this row in place of the drag-to-reorder you would use on a computer.

Composing a sky uses the usual touch gestures: drag to look around, pinch to zoom, and when the framing is right, + Capture. The playback transport also appears at the bottom, sized for comfortable tapping.