Show HN: The current sky at your approximate location, as a CSS gradient

Perceived accuracy and physical intuition

• Many commenters report the gradient matches their actual clear sky “shockingly” well, including color shift toward the horizon and wildfire-smoke haze.
• Others note mismatches when local conditions deviate from the ideal clear atmosphere: cloudy, gray, or smoky skies often appear as clear blue in the app.
• Some high-latitude users and people on daylight-saving time report that twilight and night colors can be off by about an hour.
• Several people newly notice why the horizon isn’t blue (longer optical path, more scattering/particles), and appreciate seeing that captured.

Night sky and realism limits

• At night, the page is often just black; multiple users initially think the site is broken.
• Suggestions include adding stars, night gradients, clouds, or light-pollution effects, but others argue that even in other apps, a stylized, simple sky is often preferable to realism for usability.

Weather, smoke, and measurement

• Repeated suggestion: incorporate real-time weather, haze, or satellite data so the gradient reflects actual cloud/smoke conditions.
• One commenter describes commercial work using physical sensors at windows to measure true sky color temperature and reproduce it indoors, arguing that modeling alone can’t capture clouds/smoke accurately enough.

Implementation details & web tech discussion

• People are impressed that the page renders via a simple HTML gradient with essentially no client JS or DOM complexity.
• The stack: Astro on Cloudflare Pages, using Cloudflare’s IP geolocation headers (surfaced via Astro.locals.runtime.cf) plus a sun-position library and an atmospheric-scattering model.
• There’s lively side discussion about old-school meta http-equiv="refresh" vs HTTP headers, .htaccess, nginx behavior, and limitations of early shared hosting, which explains why client hints like meta-refresh were attractive.
• Some ask for a pure client-side version; others propose using timezone as a rough location proxy for privacy.

Feature ideas and applications

• Popular ideas: live desktop/phone wallpaper, smart-home dashboards, “fake windows” or skylights, backgrounds for other sites, and a UI to tweak or copy gradients.
• Requests also include manual location/time override for when IP geolocation is wrong.

Broader discussion: realism vs product needs

• A long sub-thread debates a story about implementing a highly realistic sky in navigation software, then being told to revert to a simple blue rectangle.
• Themes include: overengineering vs scope, delight vs clarity, corporate aversion to “micro-innovations,” maintainability costs, and what professional craftsmanship should prioritize.