Solvane Sun Path Watch Face

Solvane is an analog watch face for Wear OS built around a solar module: a live drawing of the sun's path across your sky, on a curve that belongs to your latitude and to today and to no other day.

THE SUN PATH

A thin curve runs across the dial. It is the sun path for today where you are, computed from the tilt of the earth's axis, the day of the year and the latitude you set in the customization settings, and redrawn for every one of the 365 days and each of the 25 latitude bands. In midsummer at a northern latitude it stands high over the dial for most of the turn. In midwinter it barely lifts off the horizon.

A disc rides along that path at the sun's real position. The horizon line crosses the dial, and the disc meets it at sunrise and again at sunset. The top of the curve is solar noon: the moment the sun is highest where you are, which in most places is not twelve o'clock. Below the horizon the disc becomes an outline and the sky goes dark.

The sky behind the path is drawn from the sun's altitude too. Night, twilight and day are layers whose weight follows the sun down and up again, so the dial passes through the same blue hour and orange horizon band you would see outside. The stars turn overhead through the night.

Two things are needed that the watch does not hand to an app. The date gives the sun's declination and the equation of time, from the low-precision series used in astronomical almanacs. Longitude is read from the time zone the watch is already set to, matched against a table of nearly two hundred zones, so a city sitting well off the middle of its zone gets its own answer instead of the zone meridian's. Latitude is the one thing you choose: twenty-five bands from 70° N to 50° S in five-degree steps, each named after cities on it and previewing its own sun path in the picker, and the band you picked is printed on the dial. Sunrise and sunset land within a few minutes of the true local times.

No location permission is requested.

ALWAYS-ON

As the screen dims the sky drains away and the path and the sun stay behind, so the shape of the day is still readable at a glance. The hour marks slide outward and a ring of hour numbers grows in between them. Two switches control the rest: dim the whole face, and hide the central complication there. A third darkens the outer edge of the screen.

COMPLICATIONS

Four slots. One circular slot sits in the lower half of the dial and draws an arc around the value: a full scale with a marker when the reading lives inside a range, a growing fill when it counts up from zero. It takes ranged values, goal progress, weighted elements, short text, monochrome icons and small images.

Three more follow the curve of the bezel: a long-text slot across the top, two short-text slots along the bottom. All four arrive filled in and any of them can be swapped.

COLOUR

Eight independent colour controls, each drawing from the same 72-colour palette: hour marks, minute marks, complication text, complication icons and arc, the hour and minute hands, the second hand, the date and the month. Six presets ship as ready-made combinations: Solvane, Wheat, Aqua Mist, Golden Amber, Warm Beige and Champagne. You can keep going from any of them.

HANDS AND DATE

Fourteen hand styles for the hour and minute hands. Nine styles for the second hand, plus an option that removes it altogether. Under the centre one line shows the day and date, or the digital time instead if you prefer, following the system 12- or 24-hour setting; tapping it opens your calendar.

Solvane is part of Time Flies Select, a collection for the more involved horological projects in the catalogue.

COMPANION APP

An optional companion app for Android makes installing the face easier and lets you follow the rest of the catalogue. The watch face works fully without it.

Requires Wear OS 6 or later