I can see how to customize most of the Apple Watch watch faces, but the Astronomy face seems really boring. Can it be customized at all?
Some of the watch faces on the Apple Watch seem to have a ton of tricks up their sleeves, letting you pick colors, styles, photos, customize “complications” (the tiny elements on a watch face that show temperature, battery level, activity update, etc) and more. But then there’s the Astronomy face. It shows a photo of the Earth with the current dawn and dusk lines, centered on your exact location on the planet.
Not very exciting. Is that all there is?
Actually, there’s a lot this particular face has hidden. You just have to play around to find its capabilities!
To start, here’s the standard view:
Cool, but not really much to write home about.
Force-press on it to customize the display and, well, there’s nothing you can do:
Nothing! Frustrating. But…
Go back to the standard face and gently tap on it instead of the force-tap. The time scoots out of the way and now if you rotate the Crown, you can move forward and backwards in time on the display:
Two hours prior to the standard display, you can see that dawn was just breaking.
But we’re not done. Go back to the standard view and tap on the tiny circle on the lower left that looks like the moon and the Earth fades away and the moon zooms onto the screen:
Ah, bad timing on this! It’s a new moon, so there’s not much at all to see. But again, gently tap on it and rotate the Crown and you can move forward/backward in moon phases too:
Ah, in 9 days the moon’s going to look a whole lot more interesting up in the sky!
One more before we’re done, and this one’s great, particularly if you’ve seen movies like Tomb Raider where you find out that the alignment of the planets has profound importance! Tap on the lower right of the main face, with a tiny set of dots in circles.
It’s the planetary alignment of all the planets in our solar system. And again, you can use the Crown to move forward and backward in time to find when the Earth’s closest to Mars (beware the Martian invasion!) or all the planets are in alignment:
Now, tell me that’s not actually really cool!