Hi,

When I use SkyDemon on my desktop to plan a flight and I open the airfield information page that handily displays the Twilight Start, Sunrise, Sunset, and Twilight End times, these seem to be based on today rather than on the date of my flight (as specified for "Take-Off").

That rarely makes sense to me and when I'm planning such a flight for a trip in the future and want to know how late in the afternoon I can savely fly, this requires me to find a random website with the Sunset/Twilight information and that's always a bit of a pain.

What's the advantage of showing those times based on today rather than the planned date of the flight?

Thanks and best regards

Patrick

I agree. SD should provide the data for the planned take off date rather than 'today.' I know it's not ideal, but as a work around, if you are an Android user, there is an app called Sundroid which provides all this data for any date, past, present or future, just by pressing one button. I installed this app before SD started providing this data for just this purpose, and I still refer to it often, because I can access the data without having to launch SD. I can't be sure, but I expect the app is probably also available for iPad.

Mike
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I think it's because the places where Sunrise/Sunset are displayed (the Airfield Information bits) are completely unrelated to any planned route. Therefore if you were to print this "plate" of information, it makes more sense for the times to relate to the date and time printed at the bottom of the plate than for them to be related to the planned start time of a journey not otherwise mentioned.

I do agree it would be useful to have SkyDemon give you the sunrise and sunset times for an arbitrary date in the future but we would have to find the right way of doing it.

Tim,

That's a fair point to make. I hadn't considered the date stamp at the bottom and frankly, to me personally, it is irrelevant. But simply changing the date to the date of the journey could be irritating to other users.

How about using "today" as the reference day if there is no trip planned or no take-off date set and using the trip date if one is set? In that case, the Sunset/Sunrise indiciation would have to be enhanced by the date it refers to in order to avoid confusion (i.e. Sunset time on Wed, March 23rd).

I realize my suggestion has its flaws and needs to be thought through. E.g. do you use the take-off or landing date as the reference date (easy for planned take-off and landing airfields, but what about others that you're just "checking out")? And how about multi leg journeys with land in-betweens?

But for planning purposes, I would find it MUCH more useful to get a relevant date. I hardly ever plan such a flight (and the timings) on the day of the flight. That's usually too late...

I realize there's apps and websites out there than can do this, but I love SkyDemon specifically because I don't need tons of individual apps for those little and often-used tasks.

Cheers

Patrick