☼ What time is sunset tonight? Watch it, and keep its colour on a year-long ribbon

Umbriel's free Sky Ribbon works out your own sunset, or sunrise if you prefer, and at that moment asks one small thing: which colour is the sky closest to? You pick from a palette of eight, or tap "clouds". Ten seconds. Over a year the days weave into a ribbon of stripes, with the Sun's sign changes marked in the margin.

• What you'll needTen seconds at sunset; your location if you want the time
• What you getTonight's sunset or sunrise time for where you are, eight sky colours and "clouds" to choose from, and a year-long woven ribbon with the Sun's sign changes in its margin, printable as one plate
• CostFree, no account required

Most people see a few hundred sunsets a year and remember almost none of them. The Sky Ribbon keeps one stripe of each.

It starts with the time. From where you are, Umbriel works out when the Sun sets tonight, and shows it on the card. If you would rather meet the morning, choose sunrise once and it is remembered. Sunset is the default because a ritual that asks for 6 a.m. is mostly a ritual that is slept through.

At that moment you look up and pick the colour the sky is closest to, from eight engraved inks: pale lemon, gold, apricot, ember, dusty rose, mauve, dusk blue and deep indigo. If there is nothing to see, tap "clouds", which is a real answer and gets a stripe of its own. That is the whole thing, and it takes about ten seconds.

Day by day the stripes are woven into a ribbon, thirty to a row, and the margin marks each day the Sun moves into a new sign, so the year's seasons show in the weave. A day with no stripe is left as plain paper. A ribbon of two stripes is as finished as one of 365, and nothing counts the days or says you missed one.

Without a location the card still works: it simply does not say when. With one, the time is always for where you are standing today, never for a birthplace read in the wrong time zone.

Your ribbon stays private, on your device, and if you sign in it syncs end to end encrypted, the same way the journal does. Nothing is posted.

Sunset and sunrise come from the engine's own rise-and-set calculation for your location on today's date, using the position your device last reported, read in your device's time zone. A birthplace is never used for this, because a birthplace read in today's clock is the wrong time for anyone who has moved. Without a location the card leaves the time out and still takes the colour. The days the Sun enters a new sign, which mark the ribbon's margin, are the engine's ingress times, found by searching the Sun's longitude for each 30° boundary. Nothing astronomical is typed in. Each day's entry records the colour or clouds, whether it was sunset or sunrise, and when it was tapped, and only today's stripe can be written, because the ribbon is a record of looking at the sky rather than a diary to fill in afterwards. The eight colours are print inks chosen to run from dusk to dawn in one line, so the printed ribbon looks as it does on screen.