clock.bh on e-paper

The four flight faces draw aircraft that The OpenSky Network's volunteer ADS-B receivers hear over the Gulf, and only those: some hours that is forty aircraft over Bahrain, some hours one, and an empty sky on a frame means “nothing heard”, never “nothing flying”. Positions are as last reported; a frame says how old its data is once it is no longer fresh (normally after 2½ minutes), and after 15 minutes nothing is drawn as current. Airline flights are named by their flight number; every other aircraft (private, military, helicopters) is an anonymous mark, never a registration. When OpenSky is down or out of credits, the face says so.

The server asks OpenSky for one box around Manama about once a minute while a frame is being watched, and for yesterday's Bahrain International movements once a day, on its own schedule: drawing a frame never waits for OpenSky.

Data: The OpenSky Network, http://www.opensky-network.org. Cite: Matthias Schäfer, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Ivan Martinovic and Matthias Wilhelm, “Bringing up OpenSky: A large-scale ADS-B sensor network for research”, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, April 2014.

The two prayer faces show the day's times for Manama as calculated by the free AlAdhan prayer-times API: Umm al-Qura (Umm Al-Qura University, Makkah: Fajr at 18.5°, Isha 90 minutes after Maghrib, 120 in Ramadan) for the Sunni face and, for the Shia face, the method of the AlHadi calendar that Bahrain's Ja'fari community uses (Fajr at 18°, Maghrib 15 minutes after sunset, and the end of Maghrib and Isha — the beginning of night-prayer time — halfway between sunset and Fajr), with AlHadi's own column names. This is AlHadi's published method, not an AlHadi publication. Nothing else is adjusted, rounded differently or invented; the only other arithmetic is the time remaining to the next listed time, floored to the minute.

These are calculated times, not observations: follow your local mosque's or endowment's timetable. Each day's times are fetched once, ahead of need, and checked against the Sun over Manama before they are drawn; if they disagree, or the API is unreachable and nothing was fetched ahead, the face says the times are unavailable instead of showing one. The Umm al-Qura face's Hijri date is that calendar's, which can differ by a day from a sighting-based date; the Ja'fari face prints none.

The Al-Hadi face shows each day's page of Taqweem Al-Hadi (تقويم الهادي), the Ja'fari block calendar published by the Cultural Committee of the Jahromiyah Husseiniya in Manama: the page as it is published on that site — its date boxes, its Hijri date (Al-Hadi's own count, which can differ by a day from the Umm al-Qura date on other faces), its printed prayer times and its text — set beside the dial. Nothing on it is re-typed, read by software or recalculated; the face only tone-maps the page's own pixels for the panel and credits the source on every frame.

A job on the server takes the coming day's page a few minutes before midnight (two image requests a day) and checks again just after, and any image that is not today's — another edition, another day, a damaged file — is refused rather than shown; the face then says so. The pages are Al-Hadi's: this is an independent display of what they publish, not an Al-Hadi product, and their printed calendar and app remain the reference for prayer times.

The four football faces — Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A and the Champions League — draw football-data.org's data: each competition's official table, its season's matches and its ten top scorers. The server asks for the matches every ten minutes (every five while a match may be in play), the table every hour and the scorers every six hours, never more than six requests a minute, and drawing a frame never waits for a reply. On the plan this site uses, scores in play are delayed: they say so, with the time they were fetched. Kick-offs are in the clock's own time zone; "TBC" when the date is set but not the time.

The race is each of the top five's points after every matchday, counted from the results, with the rest of the league faint behind them; the dashed line is a team that won every game. The form squares are each club's last five results, oldest first: filled, won; barred, drawn; open, lost. In the leagues a dotted rule marks the three relegation places; in the Champions League the rules after 8th and 24th follow UEFA's 2024–27 format: the first eight go to the round of 16, 9th to 24th to the knockout play-offs. No crest, competition logo, kit or player's likeness is drawn: the figures are anonymous pictograms.

Data: football-data.org.

The Moon face draws NASA's LRO colour map (SVS 4720, NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University — credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio), turned by the optical libration of the day (PyEphem), lit by the exact illuminated fraction (the homepage's sky.js, checked against PyEphem) and tilted as the Moon hangs in Manama's sky; the dark side is plain black inside a thin limb. Everything is computed on the server; nothing is fetched.

The three astrology faces — Zodiac wheel, Burj and Zanbaq — show where the Sun, Moon and planets stand against the tropical zodiac over Manama, which of them are retrograde and which sign is rising. All of it is computed on the server with PyEphem; nothing is fetched. Houses are whole-sign and the lunar node is the mean node. Astrology is not science: these faces predict nothing, and there is no horoscope text on them, because it would be invented, not data.

Twenty-two faces show the time without the Hoist dial: the sixteen digital clocks, the Spoken hour, which says it in words, the Taqweem calendar's Day and Month, and the Day, Week and Month of the Seasons of Bahrain. On the ticking firmware the device repaints one small box every second, from sixty pictures of that box, one for each second, which clock.bh draws once and the device keeps in memory; they are black and white, like the second hand, and everything else changes with the minute's frame. The preview above paints the box the same way.

The Solar corona face draws the planetary Kp index from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, redrawn here and not endorsed by NOAA. The Flyover face computes the ISS's ground track and next sighting from CelesTrak element sets.

No explanations on the frames. What each face computes, estimates or assumes is said here instead, and nothing on a frame is invented.

Times. Every time on a face is Bahrain time (UTC+3), on the 24-hour clock — except on the Taqweem faces, which print prayer times exactly as Taqweem Al-Hadi does: on the 12-hour clock, without am/pm; and on the Seasons of Bahrain, which keep the 12-hour clock with its Arabic morning and evening letters.

Hijri dates. Every Hijri date on a frame is the Umm al-Qura calendar's, as on the calendar page, and can differ by a day from a sighting-based date. The exceptions are the Al-Hadi page and the four Taqweem faces, which show Al-Hadi's own date.

Maps. Kingdom, Scope and Airways draw Bahrain from OpenStreetMap: map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence (openstreetmap.org/copyright).

The NTP line. On Sundial, Sky ring, Kingdom and Sky wheel, a line such as "NTP +0.021 ms · stratum 4" is this server's own time source: its offset and its stratum. It reads "NTP not synced" when the server is not synchronised, and is left out when its state is unknown.

Sundial. The dial lies north-up, and each part casts its shadow away from the real Sun over Manama, longer as the Sun gets lower (softly capped). At night a Moon at least a quarter lit casts it; with neither up, there is none. The strip is today's 24 hours in the page's four inks: the Sun's arc solid, the Moon's dotted, a flag for now. "stale" or "no weather" by the temperature is about the weather feed, not the sky.

Sky ring. Solar noon is at the top, sunrise on the left, sunset on the right. The Moon rides the same ring at its own hour angle, so above the serration always means above the horizon.

Kingdom. The dome is the sky seen from straight above: the rim is the horizon, the centre overhead. The Sun's path is solid with a bead each hour, the Moon's dashed. The air and sea temperatures are Open-Meteo's, the sea's from its marine data.

Almanac. In the chart the Sun's path is solid and the Moon's dashed, strong above the horizon and faint below, and the sky follows the real Sun. Sunrise and sunset are the homepage's: Open-Meteo's published minute, or sky.js's, truncated to the minute, when there is none. "DAY 277 · WEEK 40" is the day of the year and the ISO week.

The Moon. The printed percentage is always the true one, with a decimal below 1% and above 99%. The drawing cannot be that fine: a crescent is never thinner than 2.3 px, and below 0.2% lit only the limb is drawn. The disc is zenith-up as seen from Manama (below the horizon the same geometry simply continues); the map is albedo only, with no relief, the shading at the terminator is the designer's, and the polar caps are filled in. The quiet line names the next new Moon (المحاق) or full Moon (البدر).

Time flies. The fly's bearing is computed — exactly the minute hand's, never random — and it takes off at the top of every hour. It is a joke, not data.

Regulator. The offset is this server's measured system-time offset from its NTP source (chrony), the figure on the homepage; the source and stratum are its own; the seven-day availability is floored, so only an unbroken week reads 100%. A battery clock's film keeps each frame for at most an hour.

Pearl bank. Bahrain only. The tide times and the sea's temperature are Open-Meteo's marine model for Bahrain, the estimate the homepage shows; the water in the tank follows a half cosine from the previous high or low to the next, scaled between the lowest and highest water listed. With no tide data the tank stays empty and says so. The oyster opens with the water for the picture's sake only.

Wind compass. The wind is Open-Meteo's current reading for the clock's city (speed and the direction it blows from). The names are the classical Arabic winds as the lexicographers set them out (al-Tha'alibi, «فقه اللغة وسر العربية»; Ibn Sida, «المخصص»): الصَّبا، الدَّبور، الشَّمال، الجَنوب for the four quarters, within 22.5° of each, and نكباء for a wind between two of them. The Gulf has its own names for its winds, which vary from coast to coast; the north-westerly shamal is the best known. A stale reading is not shown.

Year of daylight. Sunrise and sunset (the Sun's upper limb 34′ below the horizon) and civil dawn and dusk (6° below) are computed with PyEphem for every third day of the year at the clock's city, in its own clock time, so the summer-time change shows as a step. The solstices and equinoxes are PyEphem's.

Bahrain briefing. Bahrain only. Open-Meteo's current weather and marine model for Bahrain, the estimate the homepage shows. The heat-stress index is the site's WBGT estimate, on the five flags the homepage uses (25.6, 27.8, 29.5 and 31.7 °C); the dew point is computed from the temperature and humidity (Magnus); the tide curve runs a half cosine between the model's high and low waters and is not drawn beyond them.

Sky wheel. A solid dot means "in view" by the face's own cautious naked-eye model: nothing at sunset, down to magnitude 4.5 once the Sun is 18° below the horizon. Only the order is sourced, from the US National Weather Service's twilight page. An open ring is a star above the horizon but hidden by the light; by day every star is a ring, and no sighting is claimed. Grey is the sky below the horizon, the dotted line the ecliptic, and the dashed circle with hourly beads the Sun's path today, meeting the horizon at the printed sunrise and sunset; north is up, east on the left. PyEphem's own "Suhail" is λ Velorum; the face marks Canopus. Suhail's first pre-dawn sighting in August is traditionally the sign that the Gulf's worst heat is easing (The National, 2015; Gulf News, 2026).

Solar corona. The dashed ring is the G1 storm line at Kp 5− (4.67), an inference from SWPC's notation: its forecasts tag 4.67 as G1, while NOAA's scale page says only "Kp = 5". The interval under way is always SWPC's estimate, and a faint dash is a slot with no reading, never Kp 0. A reading older than 6 hours is marked STALE, after 12 hours none is shown, and LAST READING is only ever a final, observed value. Rays are 4.8 px per Kp, the shortest drawn a little longer than true so that none vanishes; white ticks mark Bahrain midnights.

Flyover. A sighting is this face's own rule: the station sunlit, the Sun more than 6° below Bahrain's horizon and the station more than 10° up. Cloud, haze, city light and the station's brightness are not modelled, and every pass is an SGP4 prediction. The big time is when the next sighting starts, the arrow runs from where it appears to where it leaves, and "up to" is how high it climbs; with none in 72 hours the face names the next pass and why it cannot be seen. Coastlines: Natural Earth (public domain).

Two times. The lead is Manama's longitude (22 min 21 s) plus the equation of time (−14 to +16 min), rounded to the minute in the big figure; the island's two ends differ by about a minute. In the year figure, across is the lead in minutes and up the Sun's geometric height at noon; the rings mark the year's least lead (+8, 11 February) and greatest (+39, 3 November). CLOCK is this server's NTP-disciplined time.

Orrery. Heliocentric longitudes from PyEphem, seen from the north; the tracks are evenly spaced, not to scale. A planet within 12° of the Sun is "in the Sun's glare", beyond 165° "opposite the Sun". The next event is searched day by day over 120 days and refined to the minute: Mercury or Venus between the Earth and the Sun (inferior conjunction) or behind it (superior), an outer planet behind the Sun (conjunction) or opposite it (opposition).

Scope. Aircraft within about 25 km of Manama are under the hub: counted, not drawn. A black disc (white at night) is below 10,000 ft, a grey disc 10,000–25,000 ft and a hollow ring higher; a cross reported no height, and a faded mark was heard more than a minute before the poll. The tail is a speed symbol, not a distance, and the dotted line is the bearing of the nearest airline flight. Ages follow the rule in the OpenSky panel above.

Yesterday at OBBI. Each half shows the three named flights nearest to this time of day, a day earlier. Airports are OpenSky's estimates and sit on lighter flaps; "unknown" means OpenSky gave none, and a code containing a digit (it could be a registration) is never printed.

Airways. The count is the distinct aircraft in the last hour's traces plus the latest poll's airborne ones; an aircraft heard only on the ground is not counted. A trace is thin where it is an hour old and thick where it is new; its arrowhead is where the aircraft was last heard, pointing along its heading (a diamond when no heading is known), and a triangle on the edge is an aircraft north or south of the map.

Overhead. "Nothing heard overhead" means OpenSky heard nothing within 150 km of Manama, not that nothing is flying. Only positions reported within 2 minutes of the poll are drawn, and the compass card's rim is the radius printed inside it.

Prayer · Umm al-Qura. أم القرى names the method: AlAdhan's Umm al-Qura calculation for Manama. Isha is whatever AlAdhan lists: 90 minutes after Maghrib, 120 in Ramadan. The ring and the list share their discs: the big solid one is next, the grey ones come later, and in the list a hollow one has passed; the half-sun is Sunrise, never a prayer, and later marks stop 90 minutes short of the ring's end, so none reads as just passed. The countdown is floored to the minute.

Prayer · Ja'fari. The numerals 1, 2 and 3 on the rod are AlAdhan's thirds of the night, counted from sunset to Fajr; they are not AlHadi columns. By AlHadi's rules the fasting time is 10 minutes before Fajr and "Dhuhr & Asr end" is sunset. "+1" or "−1" marks a time on the next or previous date. The dial carries one mark at a time: a band for the gap from sunset to Maghrib, then a diamond at "Maghrib & Isha end".

Qibla. The bearing is the initial great-circle direction from the city's centre to the Kaaba (21.4225° N, 39.8262° E) on a spherical Earth, in whole degrees from true north, clockwise; a magnetic compass points to magnetic north, which differs from true north by the local declination. The distance is along the same great circle. The line الشمس الآن في اتجاه القبلة appears while the Sun's bearing is within 3° of the Qibla's: facing the Sun then faces the Qibla. Within 25 km of the Kaaba the face gives no bearing.

Gnomon's shadow. The shadow of a vertical gnomon is the cotangent of the Sun's altitude, in the gnomon's own lengths, and twelve fingers to the length in the shadow tables of علم الميقات (al-Biruni, The Exhaustive Treatise on Shadows, tr. E. S. Kennedy, 1976). المِثْل and المِثْلان are the moments the shadow is one and two gnomon-lengths longer than at noon; the schools of jurisprudence use them differently in reckoning the times of Dhuhr and Asr, and the face states the shadow, not a ruling. The times come from the Sun's computed path in five-minute steps, interpolated.

Al-Hadi. Everything on the page is Al-Hadi's own, the Hijri date included: their count can differ by a day from the Umm al-Qura date on the other faces. When there is no page for today, the face gives the reason in one Arabic line.

The Taqweem faces: what is Al-Hadi's. The Day, The Month, The Crescent and The Year are built on Taqweem Al-Hadi's 2026-27 edition (1448 AH) as printed: Al-Hadi's own Hijri dates, the six prayer times to the minute, and each day's banner line in their words. They were taken once from the 354 day pages the site publishes and checked against every page: the month table against each printed Hijri date, the times digit by digit, each line letter by letter. Evident slips of the print were corrected and nothing else was changed. Everything printed is Al-Hadi's; these faces are a demonstration prepared for Al-Hadi's committee, whose permission has not yet been asked, and the data is not published here.

What is computed here. The countdowns; the night (the Islamic day begins at Maghrib: from Al-Hadi's printed Maghrib until Fajr every face names the night of the coming day, ليلة الجمعة, and shows that night's Hijri date, and counts days to an occasion in Islamic days); the Moon of each evening; and the crescent on evenings Al-Hadi did not print. One rule for mourning on all four faces: the day and night of a major day of grief in the calendar and of the first ten of Muharram, and the evening after. The day's ziyarah follows Mafatih al-Jinan's ziyarat of the days of the week, and the acts of the hour are the best known, where Mafatih places them: Dua Kumayl on the eve of Friday and the night of mid-Sha'ban, Dua al-Nudba on Friday morning, Dua al-Simat in Friday's last hour, Dua al-Iftitah on Ramadan nights, the vigil of the nights of Qadr (the 19th, 21st and 23rd of Ramadan), Dua Abu Hamza al-Thumali before dawn in Ramadan, Ziyarat Ashura on the day of Ashura, Dua al-Nudba also on the mornings of the Eids, Dua Arafah on the day of Arafah. Outside the printed edition the faces fall back, visibly, to the Umm al-Qura calendar and to AlAdhan's times with the AlHadi app's method.

The Day. A black frame round the page marks mourning. From Maghrib the weekday block names the night and the Hijri block shows that night's date, while the Gregorian block and the six times stay the printed day's; after Isha the plate carries tomorrow's printed Fajr, labelled فجر الغد. After Maghrib the banner gives way to tomorrow's line only when tomorrow is a major occasion, never on a night that is itself the occasion. The thin rule under the time gains one slash a second.

The Month. Each cell's Moon is the Moon at that evening's sunset over Manama, computed with PyEphem and drawn as it looks in the sky, lit on the right while it waxes (a crescent is never drawn thinner than 1.5 px). A cut corner marks an occasion: filled for grief, open for joy, a feast or a holy night, a bare cut for a historical event; larger for the major ones. The list keeps the month's major occasions first and drops past ones when space runs out; the grid marks them all. From Maghrib, tomorrow's cell is outlined: its night has begun. The dotted cell is Al-Hadi's first day of the next month.

The Crescent. On Al-Hadi's own crescent evenings (they print one page a month) the heading, the birth of the crescent, the sunset time, the table and the verdict are theirs, as printed. On every other evening the figures are clock.bh's own: computed with PyEphem for Manama at sunset, topocentric (as seen from the ground), and the verdict is given in Al-Hadi's four words, chosen by Mohammad Odeh's 2004 criterion: V under 2 غير ممكنة, under 5.65 ممكنة بالعين المسلحة, under 13 ممكنة, above واضحة — a scale that reproduces the verdicts of all twelve of their 1448 pages. On those twelve evenings our own sunset falls 1–2 minutes after theirs, so our lag is 1.5–3 minutes shorter and our altitude 0.3–0.4° lower; the elongation agrees within half a degree and the illumination within 0.2 points. The chart (positions and bearings) is always computed; it uses one scale for height and bearing, so the tilt is true, and draws the Sun and Moon larger than life. The calendar is Al-Hadi's: no face ever derives the start of a month from the Moon, and the actual start follows the sighting your marja' announces.

The Year. Marks: a solid disc is a day of grief, an open ring a joyful occasion, a ring with a dot an Eid, an open diamond Laylat al-Qadr, a stroke a historical event; larger marks are the major occasions. The dark band is Muharram and Safar, the light band Ramadan. Where occasions crowd, a mark may sit up to half a day off its date. The pointer and the countdowns move at Al-Hadi's printed Maghrib, and days are counted as Islamic days: an occasion is غداً until the Maghrib before it, then الليلة.

The season, the fruit and vegetables, the palm and its dates and the fish of each month come word for word from the month banners of the Bahrain Chamber's 2023 calendar, whose marine and farming entries were reviewed by الربان أحمد بن عيسى البوسميط and زكريا عيسى آدم. One misprint is corrected: June's تحدير النحيل is read as تحدير النخيل. The seasons are the calendar's own quarters of the year, with winter from January to March and autumn from October to December.

The calendar lists what a month has in plenty. Which fish or fruit a day shows is clock.bh's own rotation through that list, not the Chamber's. The fish are drawn in four general builds, not as portraits of each species. These faces are clock.bh's own: the Bahrain Chamber has neither made nor endorsed them.

Zodiac wheel. The grey half is the half of the zodiac below the horizon, by longitude, not any planet's altitude. Positions are apparent geocentric longitudes, truncated to the arc-minute; ASC, at 9 o'clock, and MC are the chart's angles, ℞ marks a retrograde body, and the node is the mean node. The Sun's sign wears the black disc and the Moon's the ring; the heavy rim runs from the start of the Sun's sign to the Sun. Below about 44% lit the Moon's crescent is drawn wider than true, and the Sun is a 24-hour hand only roughly: noon falls within about 15° of the top.

Burj. Tropical signs are 30° sectors counted from the March equinox, not the constellations behind the Sun: on 4 October, for instance, the Sun is in Libra by sign but in front of Virgo (IAU boundaries). Degrees are truncated to the arc-minute. The ruler is the Sun's 30° in its sign, read right to left; an entry into Aries, Cancer, Libra or Capricorn is an equinox or solstice by definition. In the band the Sun's sign is black and the Moon's outlined.

Zanbaq. The percentage under إضاءة القمر is the Moon's illuminated fraction, and the lily opens with it. The rows at the top right name the signs of the Sun and the Moon and, with الطالع after the name (الجدي الطالع: Capricorn rising), the rising sign for Manama; each row is led by the mark its body wears on the collar. The zodiac is fixed to the flower, Aries at 9 o'clock and Libra at 3; the odd signs are the tepals, the even ones the stamens.

Lunar mansions. The 28 mansions are anchored to their traditional marker stars (the usual identifications after Paul Kunitzsch's studies of the Arabic star names: β Arietis for الشرطان through β Andromedae for الرشاء), placed in today's sky by PyEphem; a mansion is the stretch of the ecliptic nearest its star, its edges halfway between neighbouring stars, so the sectors are unequal. The Moon's mansion is the one that contains its apparent ecliptic longitude. This is sky lore drawn as astronomy: nothing is predicted. Without the astronomy library the face names no mansion.

Suhail. The structure and names of the Durur follow Dr Ishaq al-Shu'aili, «السنة الفلكية وحساب الدرور» (Oman Daily): thirty-six durr of ten days in three hundreds and a last sixty, then five days (six in a leap year), al-masariq, outside the count. Where the count starts differs by region: in Oman the first hundred starts at Suhail's rising, given there as 15 August, and people of the sea start about fifteen days after the rising. The face says which it uses: Suhail's rising on 24 August, the date given for the Gulf and central Arabia by the Qatar Calendar House (Al Sharq) and the Emirates Astronomy Society (Emarat Al Youm). Canopus's altitude, bearing, rising and setting are computed for the clock's city with PyEphem; north of about 37° N it never rises.

Liquid crystal. An homage to the classic Casio digital watches, with no affiliation and none of their names or printed words. The dotted shapes are "ghosts" of the unlit segments, drawn as a black dot screen so that the device's black-and-white seconds match the rest. NTP lit means clock.bh's own NTP server reports itself synchronised (fresh metrics, normal leap status, stratum below 16), not that the panel itself has synced. 24H means a 24-hour display; Bahrain is UTC+3, with no daylight saving. The battery icon is drawn by the device. The colon does not blink: only the seconds repaint each second.

Nixie. The tubes are drawn, not photographed: IN-18 scale for the hours and minutes, IN-14 for the seconds, and INS-1 neon lamps for the colon. The cold numerals stack in the real IN-14 order, front to back 1 6 2 7 5 0 4 9 8 3, which is why some numerals show more wires across them than others. The honeycomb round each glowing numeral is the anode mesh, lit by the glow. The seconds tick on the device every second, while HH:MM change with the minute's frame; the hour keeps its leading zero, as on nixie clocks. The face needs no outside data, only the time.

Flip-dot. Reading the seconds row: full discs are seconds gone, the half-turned disc is the second under way, ticks mark every 5 seconds (long ones at the quarters), and the row clears at :00. Nothing physically flips: the kinship is that e-paper, like flip-discs, keeps its picture without power. The two boards echo a bus's route-number and destination boards; the disc pitches are 20 and 12 px (5:3), and each disc is its pitch divided by φ.

Golden. The rectangle is the 89 × 55 Fibonacci tiling at 8 px a unit, golden to a third of a pixel. The spiral is the quarter-circle Fibonacci spiral, the usual stand-in for the true golden spiral. The numbers fall by φ: 168, 104, 64 and 40 px. The plate turns black when the Sun is 6° below the horizon over Manama, and white again at dawn. It shows the weekday and the day of the month only.

World time. An homage to the world-time digital watches of the late 1980s, with no maker's name, model or features of its own. The city, UTC offset and sunrise and sunset are the clock's place; the Hijri date is Umm al-Qura; "NTP · STRATUM" is this server's own time source.

Spoken hour. The phrasing is classical: the hour as a feminine ordinal, the quarter, third and half as الربع، الثلث، النصف, and 40, 45, 50 and 55 said against the coming hour (إلا ثلثًا، إلا ربعًا، إلا عشر دقائق، إلا خمس دقائق). The part of the day follows the Sun at the clock's city: فجرًا from astronomical dawn (the Sun 18° below the horizon), صباحًا from sunrise, ظهرًا from solar noon, عصرًا from Asr (a shadow as long as the object plus its noon shadow), مساءً from sunset until the middle of the night or midnight, ليلًا after.

Star rosette. The inner twelve lozenges are the hours of a twelve-hour clock (the current one black, those passed grey), the sixty petals the minutes, inked one a minute from the top. A geometric ornament in the manner of Islamic star patterns, not a reconstruction of a historical one.

Internet pulse. Data: Cloudflare Radar, under the CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. The trace is all the traffic Cloudflare sees from the clock's country, hourly, as Radar's "MIN0_MAX" normalisation (each hour divided by the highest), so the large figure is a share of the week's peak, not a volume; Radar's newest hour runs a few hours behind, and the face says which hour it is. "Vs usual" compares that hour with the mean of the same hour over the thirteen days before; "vs last week" compares the last seven days with the seven before. The shares are of the HTTP requests Cloudflare served from the country over seven days: from mobile devices, classed as likely automated, over IPv6, over HTTP/3, with post-quantum key agreement, and the operating systems and networks (autonomous systems, by their registered names, shortened) that sent them. Download, upload and latency are the medians of the speed tests run from the country over Radar's window (90 days). The outage line appears only when Cloudflare has annotated an outage there in the last week. Cloudflare sees a large share of the web, not all of it. When the data is unavailable the face says so.

Tonight's sky. Computed with PyEphem for the clock's city: sunset (the Sun's upper limb 34′ below the horizon), full darkness while the Sun is more than 18° below it, the Moon's altitude every half hour, and the planets' next rise, transit (altitude and direction) and set, their magnitude and elongation ("in glare" within 13° of the Sun). The Space Station's passes over 12° in the next 24 hours come from CelesTrak's current elements; a pass is "visible" when the station is sunlit at its highest point and the Sun is at least 6° below the horizon.

Pendulum wave. Pendulum k (0 to 20) makes 60 + k swings a minute, from 248 mm (a one-second period) down to 140 mm. Because the panel looks once a second, only the slow pattern shows, and at :00 every ball crosses the centre at once and hides behind the nearest. The perspective is computed for 50 mm balls 60 mm apart, seen from 400 mm; the swing is drawn wider than a real machine's so it is easier to see. By the same arithmetic the row also lines up at :30, every second ball mirrored, so a clock that wakes only every 30 seconds always shows the single ball. Drawn, not simulated: no friction, no air.

Geneva drive. The discs show the place's own 24-hour time; nothing is fetched. The discs jump at once, the way jumping-hour and big-date watches work: the Geneva index, :42 to :00 (108° of the crank's turn, 18 seconds), only cocks the jump, and the minute disc moves as the wheel locks. The numerals are printed smaller than real ones of that size would be, which is why the loupes magnify about 5 and 9 times. When the clock rests its seconds at night or on low battery, the drive is hidden and the two loupes still show the time.

Perfect fit. The twelve pentominoes cover 60 squares and tile exactly four rectangles: 6 × 10 (2,339 ways, counting rotations and reflections as one), 5 × 12 (1,010), 4 × 15 (368) and 3 × 20 (2). The hourly boards are 96 of the 6 × 10 tilings, solved offline with Knuth's Algorithm X and checked by the server; nothing is fetched. The board follows the clock's local time, and the seconds trays rest at night and on low battery while the rest of the page still shows the time.

Drop by drop. The ink level is one line through all four numerals and rises one step a minute, so half full means half past; it stands full through the hour's first minute, and then the siphon empties it. The splash is drawn by hand, loosely after the crown and jet of high-speed photographs of falling drops; it is not a fluid simulation. The face uses only the clock's time and the Sun's height at the clock's place, which sets the night plate.

The previews above show the faces as they are now. These are the same faces on other days of the 1448 calendar, rendered from the very code the devices use.