Skyty 1.4 — Satellites overhead, eclipses ahead, the Equator behind you
because you should know when you cross the Equator at 23:47 over the Pacific.
Some moments on a long-haul flight are silent. The cabin’s asleep. The window shade is half down. You reach an invisible line on the map and nothing in the cabin marks it. Then you’re past it.
Skyty 1.4 ships today. Four new Live Events join the map, plus a cleaner way to prepare for the flight, plus an expanded view for rocket launches. Together they answer a question 1.3 only half-answered: what should I be looking at right now?
Four new Live Events
The Live Events layer doubles in 1.4.
- Visible satellites — predicted overflights of well-known satellites: ISS, Hubble, Tiangong, Starlink trains. A pin appears for each pass that’s visible from your seat at altitude.
- Solar and lunar eclipses — paths drawn on the map, precomputed all the way to 2035. The pin tells you when totality reaches you, plus magnitude at your specific seat.
- Noctilucent clouds — seasonal in mid- and high latitudes, visible roughly an hour after sunset and before sunrise. Skyty cues you when conditions match.
- Geographic transitions — the Equator, the International Date Line, the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and the Arctic and Antarctic Circles. A small pin lights up the moment you cross.
Each pin still does the simple thing: tap, see what it is, see how far and when. No menu, no setup.
Prepare for Flight — one tap
There’s a new section in Settings called Prepare for Flight. One tap pulls all Live Event data for the next 24 hours into local storage — launches, aurora, eclipses, satellites, transitions, the lot.
The intent: the moment before you board is already busy. We want one button that solves the whole offline problem, not five toggles.
Rocket launches got their own view
Tap a launch pin and 1.4 gives you:
- A live T-MINUS countdown to lift-off.
- A launch-window indicator, since most launches have a window, not a moment.
- For launches that already happened — “X minutes ago” with a small playback marker so you know whether you missed it by two minutes or two hours.
If a launch is happening along your route while you’re flying, it’s now obvious enough that you’ll actually look out of the window.
A primer for each category
Live Events grew out of “what is this pin?” territory and into “I don’t know what aurora actually looks like out of a window.” So each category now has a short primer card — a paragraph or two explaining what to look for, when to look, and which side of the plane to ask for.
The primers are written by people who’ve actually seen each thing from a window seat, not by a Wikipedia summary.
Plus: the usual small polish
A few small finishes spread across the app — nothing user-facing worth its own headline, but the kind of things you’ll notice on a long-haul.
Where to get it
App Store → Skyty → Update. Auto-update users already have it.
The Live Events expansion is included with the app — no premium upgrade. Prepare for Flight is one tap in Settings before take-off.
What’s next
v1.5 is in the works, focused on the window-side checklist: small nudges that get you to look up at the right moments. Plus a long-overdue accessibility pass on Live Activity colour and font weight.
Until then: the next time you fly south at night, watch your map around midnight Pacific time. You’ll catch the Equator before the seatbelt sign goes off.