Release v1.9

weewx-skyfield 1.9

This release adds two almanac tag families with no PyEphem counterpart — eclipses
visible from your station, and the constellation every body currently stands in — and
puts both on the Sky page. It is a drop-in upgrade: no weewx.conf changes, no new
dependencies, nothing downloaded at run time, and every existing tag behaves exactly
as before.

What's new

• Eclipse tags. $almanac.next_lunar_eclipse and $almanac.next_solar_eclipse
  (with previous_ counterparts) give the time of maximum of the nearest eclipse
  visible from your station — the eclipsed body must be above the horizon at
  maximum, so an eclipse on the other side of the world is skipped. Each has a
  _type companion: penumbral/partial/total for lunar, and for solar the type
  as seen from your location (partial/annular/total) — a station that catches
  only the penumbra of a total eclipse reports partial, which is what an observer
  there will see. When a skin just wants "the next eclipse, whichever kind",
  $almanac.next_eclipse picks the sooner, with _kind (lunar/solar) and
  _type companions. The time tags are ordinary formattable ValueHelpers; the next
  visible eclipse can be years out, so include the year when formatting dates.
• Constellation tags. Every body — planets, sun, moon, and every star — reports
  the IAU constellation it stands in, judged from your station's topocentric view
  against the official boundaries: $almanac.saturn.constellation ("Pisces"),
  $almanac.saturn.constellation_abbr ("Psc"). The boundary map ships inside the
  Skyfield library, so nothing is downloaded.
• The Sky page shows both. The countdown row gains a chip for the next eclipse
  visible from your station (lunar or solar, whichever comes sooner, with its locally
  seen type), and each planet chip names the constellation the planet stands in.
• The README explains the ephemeris choice. A new section, "Why the DE421
  ephemeris (and not DE440)?", documents why the bundled DE421 is the right trade.

Requirements

• Python 3.9 or later
• WeeWX 5.2 or later
• Skyfield (1.47 or later) and NumPy in WeeWX's Python environment (see the
  README); PyEphem is NOT required

Installing/upgrading

Download weewx-skyfield.zip from this release, then:

weectl extension install weewx-skyfield.zip

Restart WeeWX. No weewx.conf changes are needed when upgrading from 1.x.
Note that upgrading replaces the bundled skin (skins/Skyfield/) — if you
customized it, save a copy first.