Night readability on SATELLITE + VIIRS night lights: aircraft colors and layer opacity (before/after)

[vmguessab]

Hi! I keep ShadowBroker open all day as a half-screen "wallpaper" on a 4K TV (150 % scaling) to watch air traffic, mostly in SATELLITE style with VIIRS night lights on. At night the map was hard to read, so I tuned a few values locally. Sharing the before/after in case it's useful. Happy to turn it into a PR, or into a display option, if you like it.

Tested on v0.9.84 (image of 24 Aug 2026). I checked current main (e6e8f6e, 6 Nov 2026): the values below are unchanged there, so this still applies. I left the panels alone, since your website restyle already reworked them.

Night: SATELLITE + VIIRS night lights

Day: SATELLITE

Close-up around Paris

What changed

1. VIIRS night-lights layer (MaplibreViewer.tsx, viirs-nightlights-layer): raster-opacity 0.9 → 0.55, plus raster-brightness-min: 0.08 and raster-brightness-max: 0.88. At 0.9 the layer hides the imagery almost completely, and the city glow competes with the aircraft.
2. Reference overlay over imagery (imageryReferenceOverlayOpacity): 1 with night lights (0.9 without) → 0.7.
3. Aircraft fills (map/icons/AircraftIcons.ts):

Category	Before	After
Commercial (DimCyan)	#0891b2	#7CC4F0
Private / jets	#9B59B6	#E59CC8
Fighter / tanker / recon	yellow	#F0E442
Tracked dark blue / navy	#1A3A8A / #000080	#8C9EFF
Tracked black	#222	#9CA3AF
Grounded	#555	#7A7A7A

Military amber is unchanged. The black icon outline takes the fill color: on a TV, the thin black stroke reads as a dark rim around each aircraft.

Contrast (WCAG 2 ratio / APCA Lc) on a dark map (#12151c) and on green imagery (#4e6248):

Category	Dark map, before → after	Imagery, before → after
Commercial	4.96:1 / Lc −37 → 9.58:1 / Lc −65	1.80:1 → 3.48:1
Private / jets	3.91:1 / Lc −29 → 8.63:1 / Lc −60	1.42:1 → 3.14:1
Tracked dark blue	1.75:1 / Lc −8 → 7.35:1 / Lc −52	1.57:1 → 2.67:1
Tracked black	1.15:1 / Lc 0 → 7.19:1 / Lc −51	2.40:1 → 2.61:1

The colors were picked for contrast on dark backgrounds and to stay distinct under color-vision deficiency (sky blue, pink and yellow, close to the Okabe-Ito set).

Now that there is a Display settings menu (sensor mode, map tone), this could also live there as a "high contrast" option instead of changing the defaults. Whichever you prefer.

[vmguessab]

Closing as outdated: I kept tuning the aircraft colors and these values are no longer the ones I use. The up-to-date version, with new before/after screenshots, is #696.