Nova DSO Tracker v6.1.0 released

Release Date: 2026-06-03

New Features

Directional skyglow horizon overlay from NASA VIIRS data, computed in the background when you save a location – requires a free NASA Earthdata token (NASA_EARTHDATA_TOKEN in .env); register at https://urs.earthdata.nasa.gov/
Elevation input on the Locations config form, persisted to the database and included in exports
Skyglow cache metadata with stale-computation skipping -recomputes only when location or weather data changes

Locations config UI: larger card borders, more prominent names
SQM Zenith field now has a contextual help badge (?) with a full help modal in 6 languages; inline hint text replaced with tooltip
Help badges added to the Graph view, localized in 6 languages

Header bar no longer shows stale data after loadSessionViaAjax
Redundant datetime.datetime.utcnow() nesting in the skyglow background task
High-latitude summer locations (e.g. London in June) no longer show max altitude 0 and observable time 0 in the dashboard and graph view – the observable window now falls back to the sunset→sunrise interval when astronomical twilight is absent, with observable duration correctly reported as 0 (no astronomical night)
Moon phase and moon separation are no longer shown as N/A in graph view for locations without astronomical twilight – dusk time now falls back to 22:00 when astronomical dusk is unavailable
Astronomical dawn is now computed starting from dusk time rather than local midnight, fixing incorrect N/A dawn for mid-latitude summer nights (e.g. London in July) where the sun briefly dips below −18°

nova_data/ added to .dockerignore; instance/skyglow and tools/skyglow/__pycache__ added to .gitignore
h5py added to requirements.txt for HDF5 night sky model support