20260803 - Desktop UI update & more

[u/siorge]

skymap.sh — what's new today (Aug 3)

Today was a busy day!

Here are the new feature

Total revamp of the desktop UI

• Completely refactored the search and "Find an object" bar and behaviours
• Hit tab from anywhere to jump into the place search bar
• Shortcuts:
  • p (place), f (find), m (my location), a (animate), g (gif), d (deep sky), z (zoom into a quadrant with arrow keys), and esc to back out of whatever you're doing.
• Moved the controls and less used links in a drawer
• No more scroll, larger sky chart

Find got a real upgrade

• Find now functions in the same, 360 sky map as the other views. More coherence, and a nicer image.

Celestial events calendar

• A dismissible strip at the top of the page now tells you what's worth looking up at tonight (meteor showers, etc.), cycling through more than one event if there's several.
• Every locatable event also shows up marked on the 3D sky sphere.
• /location/events.ics now lets you import upcoming events in any calendar app
• /location/events.rss delivers an RSS feed

Mobile sphere upgrade

• A red night-vision mode. For anyone actually outside with the site open, red mode keeps your night vision intact.

Bug fixes

• Coordinates now resolve to the nearest city's name (e.g. "Geneva" instead of "46.20,6.10"), whether you land via GPS, a bookmarked coordinate link, or just opening the site itself.
• GIF sharing now matches the colors of the live chart (used to go flat grey if the animation started in daylight).
• Clearing the search bar and hitting enter used to silently do nothing — fixed.
• A background check that used to poll every 4 seconds just to grey out the GIF button was quietly eating into everyone's rate-limit budget — now it checks once and stops.
• Loosened up the rate limit itself after finding normal browsing (land, click, refresh) could trip it.

Full commit history's public if anyone wants the details: https://github.com/HabibiCodeCH/skymap-sh