The Events tab — concerts, the town calendar and rocket launches

The Events tab is one dated list of everything happening at the beach over the next 45 days: the Town of Sunset Beach’s community calendar, the Sunset Sound Waves concert series at Town Park, the Sunset Beach Fishing Pier’s summer concerts, rocket launches from Cape Canaveral and Wallops Island, and tonight’s sunset (plus a near-full moonrise over the ocean when there is one). Entries are grouped by the calendar day at the beach, and a Next visible launch card sits at the top whenever a launch is expected to be visible from the strand.

What is on the list

Kind (filter chip)	What it is	Where it comes from
Music	Sunset Sound Waves concerts at Town Park, the pier’s summer concert series, and any other music on the town calendar	Town calendar feed, the town’s Sunset Sound Waves schedule page, the pier’s events page
Market	Markets, festivals and fairs	Town calendar feed
Community	Anything on the town calendar that isn’t one of the other kinds	Town calendar feed
Holiday	Holiday closures and observed holidays	Town calendar feed
Launch	Rocket launches from Cape Canaveral / KSC and Wallops Island, visible or not	Launch Library 2
Sky	Today’s sunset (with its forecast rating) and, when the moon is at least 85% lit and rises over open water, “Moonrise over the ocean”	Computed by the Worker from solar and lunar geometry

Council meetings, garbage and recycling collections, and private bookings are on the town’s calendar too, but the app filters them out — only things a person might turn up for are shown.

Every entry has a start time (or All day), the venue where it differs from the subtitle, and a small outward-arrow icon when tapping it opens the source page in your browser — the town calendar, the town’s Sound Waves schedule page or the pier’s events page. Launch rows open the launch detail screen inside the app instead, and the sunset and moonrise rows open nothing.

Two empty states are possible: “Nothing scheduled in the next few weeks.” when nothing at all is on, and “Nothing matches those filters.” when your chip selection hides everything.

What “series” means next to a concert

A concert marked series (in amber) was reconstructed from a stated weekly pattern rather than read from a feed. The town’s calendar carries the Sunset Sound Waves season opener as a single event with no recurrence rule, so expanding the feed alone would show one concert in May and nothing all summer. The town’s schedule page states the pattern in prose — each Wednesday from late May, 6 to 8 PM at Town Park — so the rest of the season is generated from that rule. Every generated occurrence is titled “Sunset Sound Waves concert” and carries this note:

Weekly series per the town’s schedule page. The lineup isn’t published per week, and the season end date is assumed to be Labor Day.

Two consequences worth knowing:

No per-week line-up. The town does not publish who is playing on a given Wednesday anywhere the app can read, so the row never names an artist.
The season end is an assumption. Occurrences stop at Labor Day (the first Monday in September) because that is when these series conventionally end, not because the town has said so.

Pier concerts are different: they are read from the pier’s own events page, which lists each date and artist individually (Thursdays, 6–8 PM unless the page says otherwise), so they carry the artist’s name and no “series” label. That page is a hand-maintained web page rather than a feed, so it can stop parsing when the pier redesigns it — see Limits.

Filter chips

When more than one kind of event is on the list, a row of chips appears above it: All, then one chip per kind that is actually present (Community, Holiday, Launch, Market, Music, Sky). A chip is only offered for a kind that has entries, so a missing chip means nothing of that kind is scheduled, not that the feed is broken. Tap chips to combine them; All clears the selection.

Day groups

Events are grouped by the calendar day at the beach (US Eastern time), not the day on your phone — a 9 PM concert is on Thursday at the pier whatever time zone you are in. Each group header shows the date and, for the next week, today, tomorrow or in N days.

Next visible launch

The card at the top of the tab appears only when the Worker has a launch it expects you to be able to see from the beach. It shows the launch name, the launch time with a relative countdown, and the visibility verdict, for example “Good chance. Look SE, about 18° above the horizon, around T+360s. You’ll want a clear ocean horizon.” Tap it to open the launch detail screen. A Cached or Unavailable badge under the card means the launch schedule is not live — see How fresh the data is.

“Visible” is the Worker’s model verdict, not a promise: a launch counts as visible when its modelled trajectory clears the horizon from Sunset Beach, it is not a daytime launch, and its visibility score is at least 30 out of 100. Launches that fail that test still appear as ordinary rows in the list with their verdict as the subtitle (for example “Not visible — stays below the horizon.” or “Daytime launch — not visible from here.”). Only launches from Cape Canaveral / Kennedy Space Center and Wallops Island are considered at all; every other pad on Earth is too far away or on the wrong side of the horizon. The model itself — inferred inclination, ascent corridor, refraction, twilight lighting — is described in How the app judges things.

The launch detail screen

The screen is titled with the launch provider (for example “SpaceX”) and has up to five sections:

Section	What it shows
Verdict	The launch name, a score ring (0–100), the verdict sentence, and high, medium or low confidence. Below that: the launch time and day, the status from Launch Library 2, any model notes, and — when the orbit allows both a northeasterly and a southeasterly corridor — a warning that the trajectory is genuinely ambiguous, both are modelled, and confidence is reduced.
Ascent from the beach	A chart of the rocket’s elevation above the horizon against minutes after launch, with a “best look” marker. Below the dashed line the vehicle is under the horizon from here. Shown only when the model produced an ascent profile.
Where to look	Direction (compass point and degrees true), Elevation above the horizon, Best at (the best-looking moment as a wall-clock time at the beach, with T+seconds), and Distance in miles to the pad.
Mission	Rocket, orbit, pad and the mission description.
Links	Watch live when the operator has published a webcast (only a handful of launches do), and Launch page — the operator’s own page, or a Space Launch Now page for launches without one. Both open in your browser.

The “best” moment is the best-looking one, not peak elevation. The two differ because the plume is usually only sunlit earlier in the ascent, and a plume against a lit daytime sky is not visible however high it climbs.

Pull down to refresh. The share button in the toolbar produces a text summary of what is on — see Sharing. Launch alerts (“Worth a special trip”) are set up on the Alerts screen — the bell in this tab’s toolbar opens it — see Alerts and notifications.

Next steps

How the app judges things The launch visibility model behind the verdict, score and confidence, alongside the sunset and activity scoring.

Where every number comes from The town calendar feed, the pier's events page, the Sound Waves schedule page and Launch Library 2, with how often each is refreshed.

Alerts and notifications How to be told about a visible launch before it happens.

Limits and what it doesn't know Why the concert series is inferred, why the pier page can stop parsing, and the launch schedule's upstream rate limit.