Live sky conditions, seeing, and tonight's events — in your Mac's menu bar. Transit tells you when to look up.
$9.99 · One-time purchase · Requires macOS 15 or newer and an Apple Silicon Mac.
Transit is a native macOS menu bar app for anyone who watches the night sky — through an eyepiece or a camera. It tells you when something is worth going outside for, with enough lead time to carry your gear out and let it settle to the night air. A synthesized conditions score, an atmospheric seeing estimate, and tonight's events — the ISS passing overhead, Io casting its shadow across Jupiter, the Moon rising beside Saturn — sit in a single glance in your Mac's menu bar. Planetarium apps like SkySafari and Sky Guide show you where things are when you open them; Transit is a layer you never open until it taps you on the shoulder. Its notifications check the sky before they fire, so you're only pulled outside when an event is genuinely observable: clear, high enough, and within your observing hours. Then you catch it with your own eyes, or set up and photograph it. Built on the same conditions engine as Laminar, Transit needs no camera, no account, and no subscription. Available on the Mac App Store for a one-time purchase of $9.99.
Before You Set Up
One number tells you if tonight is worth it.
Transit sits in your menu bar showing a synthesized Conditions score (0–100) that folds cloud cover, transparency, seeing, dew-point spread, and moonlight into a single verdict — a combination no weather app makes. Next to it, a Seeing score estimates atmospheric stability for planetary detail.
The score isn't an average — it's gated. When the sky is overcast, the score reads 0, full stop, no matter how gentle the wind or how thin the moon. You can't average past an opaque sky, and that honesty is what makes a number in your menu bar worth trusting.
Show both scores, one, or just the glyph — the bar footprint is your choice.
The Night Arc
See the whole night at a glance — and when it's worth staying up.
At the top of the panel, a single timeline maps your night from sunset to sunrise. Every event worth catching becomes a tick, placed by time and tinted by the body it belongs to — so you read the shape of the night before you read a single row.
A soft band marks when the Moon is above the horizon and washing out faint targets. The warm ends are twilight; the dark middle is true astronomical dark. A blue pin marks now. Clusters of ticks are your busy windows; the long empty stretch is when you can sleep.
Hover any tick for the event and its time. It's not a second place to read your data — it's an index of the lists below, showing you at a glance what the rows spell out in detail.
Hover any tick to see its event and time.
The Signature
Notifications that check the sky before they bother you.
Every alert passes through gates you set once: your observing hours (no 3 AM pings unless you ask for them), a clear-sky gate that suppresses alerts when it's overcast, and altitude and seeing floors so you're never summoned outside for a planet mired in the murk at 12°.
An event you can't see is just noise. When the sky closes up, Transit pauses alerts and shows a small cloud shape on the menu bar item instead — the events are still listed in the panel, but nothing pings.
Alerts speak plainly: "Io is crossing Jupiter's limb" — not "GRS CM transit 02:14 UT." Each event type has one control that spans everything from a silent badge to a heads-up a day ahead.
Tonight's Events
Every event worth catching, grouped so busy nights stay readable.
One click opens tonight's inventory: rise, transit, and set times for every planet, Great Red Spot transits, Galilean moon events — shadow transits, occultations, eclipses — oppositions, conjunctions, lunar phase and moonrise, and satellite passes.
Jupiter alone can throw a dozen events at a single night. Transit groups everything by planet, each header carries the planet's name and event count — and gives Jupiter its own internal structure so a Galilean traffic jam never buries Saturn's transit time. Turn off the planets you're not tracking and they drop out of the list entirely.
Everything is computed locally on your Mac from a professional-grade ephemeris — rise and set times, altitudes, moon events, oppositions. No account, and for the core almanac, no network at all.
Satellites
ISS, Tiangong, and Hubble passes — with orbits that keep themselves current.
Transit tracks the bright, imageable Earth-orbiting objects out of the box: ISS, Tiangong, and Hubble — visible passes with direction, brightness, and timing so you know exactly where to look.
Satellite orbital elements go stale in days, and an app that makes you press "refresh" to stay accurate will eventually lie to you. Transit refreshes orbital data automatically in the background and simply shows you its freshness. Offline, it uses the last good data and flags reduced confidence rather than going blank.
Pass predictions honor the same gates as everything else — a pass hidden behind clouds doesn't ping you.
Designed for the Menu Bar
Ambient by default. Granular when you want it.
Everything about Transit is built to earn a permanent spot on your Mac.
One Icon — or Four
A single Transit item opens one combined panel by default. Prefer separate icons for Conditions, Planets, Sun & Moon, or Satellites? Promote any of them — they coexist, and you drag the order.
Your Bar, Your Format
Show conditions and seeing (92·37), one score, or a quiet glyph. The event and overcast badges ride on whichever format you pick.
Glance-Readable State
A filled dot means an event is live. A cloud shape means overcast, alerts paused. State reads by shape, not color — legible in light or dark mode, and for colorblind users.
Observing Hours
Alerts fire only inside a window you define — sundown to 11 PM, dusk to dawn, whatever fits your life. Both ends are editable.
One Control per Event
Each event type has a single ordered setting: Off · Badge only · At event · 15 min · 1 hour · 1 day before. No toggle mazes.
Altitude & Seeing Floors
Set a minimum altitude and seeing threshold once, and Transit stops recommending targets wallowing in the atmospheric soup near the horizon.
Computed on Your Mac
Rise and set times, altitudes, Galilean events, oppositions, conjunctions — all calculated locally from a professional ephemeris. No account. No sign-in.
Data That Refreshes Itself
Satellite orbital elements go stale in days, so Transit refreshes them automatically in the background and always shows their freshness.
Sun & Moon, First-Class
Solar imaging windows, lunar phase and moonrise, and the Moon's washout effect folded into the conditions score — the luminaries get their own category.
Not Another Planetarium
Planetariums show you where. Transit tells you when.
SkySafari and Sky Guide are superb planetariums — you open them, and they show you the sky. Transit inverts the relationship.
A planetarium you open
- You remember to check it
- You dig for tonight's events
- You cross-reference a weather app
- You decide if it's worth going out
- Rich sky charts when you want to explore
A layer that taps you on the shoulder
- It lives in your menu bar, always current
- Events, conditions, and seeing in one glance
- Alerts pre-checked against clouds and altitude
- It tells you when looking is worth it
- Keep your planetarium — Transit is the trigger
One Ecosystem
From "look up now" to final image.
Transit tells you when. Laminar captures it. Strata stacks and sharpens. Meridian archives it. All built on the same Mac-native foundation.
Swift & SwiftUI · Apple Silicon Native · No Subscriptions · Transit shares Laminar's conditions engine
Pricing
No subscriptions. No tiers. Buy it once, it's yours.
Transit
One-time purchase · No subscription · Yours forever
- Conditions + Seeing scores in the menu bar
- Full weather, sky & moon detail panel
- All planets — rise/transit/set, altitudes, oppositions
- Galilean moon events & Great Red Spot transits
- Sun & Moon — solar windows, phase, occultations
- ISS, Tiangong & Hubble passes with auto-refresh
- Conditions-gated, plain-language notifications
- Observing hours, altitude & seeing floors
Requires macOS 15+ · Apple Silicon
Never miss another shadow transit.
Put the sky in your menu bar. Transit taps you on the shoulder when it's worth stepping outside.
Download on the Mac App Store$9.99 · One-time purchase · Requires macOS 15+ · Apple Silicon
Common questions about Transit for macOS.