Moondark is an instrument, and like any instrument it rewards knowing what each part of the face is for. The Now screen is built to be read in one glance. At the top is the Moon’s phase and the next cardinal phase. In the center, largest, is her degree and sign, and beneath it the answer to the question the app was built to answer: whether she is void, until when, and what the last aspect was that began the void. When the Moon is void, the center turns candle gold. Nothing else in the app is ever that color.
Along the bottom is a row of eleven glyphs, every body Moondark watches, in the order of their orbits from the Sun outward: Sun, Mercury, Venus, Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. A body that is retrograde is drawn in rose. Nothing else in the app is that color either, so the two warms never mean two things. Tap any glyph for a sheet with the body’s position, its state, the image for its degree, and a way into its page.
The Sky tab lists what is retrograde now and what is turning soon, and leads to each body’s passage page, where the whole season is drawn as a timeline: enters shadow, stands still and turns back, stands still and turns forward, leaves shadow. The Moon tab holds the lunation, her sign, and the nodes, and leads to the eclipses. Next lists the coming voids. Look up a moment lets you enter any date and time from 1950 to 2100, in any time zone, and see what the sky was doing then, and send the result to someone as a link.
Learn is where Moondark explains itself: what a void is, how it is calculated, why voids differ between apps, and, in these essays, what the rest of the face means. The reading surfaces, the Now screen and the readings that open from it, keep a different rule. They never define the void. They speak as if the reader already knows, because the reader who opens Moondark twice already does.
Every date and time in the app is computed, not looked up, from the same ephemeris, and shown in your time zone unless you choose another. Every specific degree carries its image. Every interpretive sentence is attributed to astrologers, offered rather than asserted, and leaves the reader to decide. Moondark tells you what the sky is doing. What it means is yours.