What is astro-micro-station?

Astronomy Micro Station is firmware for a specific piece of hardware: the LILYGO T-Display S3 Pro, a small ESP32-S3 microcontroller board with a 2.33 inch color touchscreen built in. It turns that device into a dedicated astronomy display that sits on your desk or nightstand and shows real time sun and moon data without needing a phone or computer. The display is divided into four screens you navigate by tapping anywhere on the screen. The first covers moon detail: phase image, illumination percentage, rise and set times, altitude, azimuth, and distance. The second covers sun and daytime: sunrise, sunset, solar noon, day length, and altitude. The third and fourth cover morning and evening twilight in detail, including astronomical, nautical, and civil twilight windows, blue hour, and golden hour, timing information that photographers, birdwatchers, and stargazers frequently need. Data comes from the ipgeolocation.io Astronomy API, fetched every 15 minutes over WiFi and cached to the device's onboard storage so the last known data still loads if the device boots without internet access. The free tier of that API covers the usage easily, about 96 requests per day. For users with a Home Assistant smart home hub, the device can optionally publish all 19 astronomy values to it automatically via MQTT, the standard messaging protocol for home automation, with no manual configuration file editing required. There is also a night vision mode: a long press anywhere switches the display to deep red tones to preserve your eyes' adaptation to darkness while stargazing. Written in C.