A hands-on lab for XRPL Education Month
Sky on the Ledger.
Live Sky stays exactly as it is. This page is the classroom beside it. You will save a sky snapshot on the XRPL testnet, then read every field of a real transaction in plain words.
Save a snapshot, then come back.
Live Sky is the lab bench. Follow these steps, then scroll down to see what you actually did.
- 1
Open sky.astrobear589.com. Look at the live wheel. That sky is calculated in your browser and synced to mainnet ledger close times.
- 2
Connect a testnet-capable XRPL wallet when you are ready to write. Live Sky has its own short instructions for this. You are practicing on testnet, not sending real XRP.
- 3
Tap the button that saves a sky snapshot. Approve the transaction in your wallet. The site writes a tiny memo with the sky time and each planet's position, rounded to the nearest arc minute.
- 4
When it succeeds, open the testnet explorer link it gives you. That page is the official public record of what just happened.
- 5
Come back here. The walk-through below uses a real example so you can label every field, even before you save your own.
A hard rule: never put a birth date, a birth time, a name, or any other personal detail in a ledger memo. Anything written to a ledger is public and permanent, even on testnet. Live Sky only stores sky positions and times.
One snapshot, read field by field.
This is a real testnet transaction. The page fetches it from a testnet API and labels what each field means. You can also open it on the explorer or view the saved sky on the Live Sky wheel.
Open the explorer View this sky on the wheel
Reading the example transaction from a testnet API…
Two short notes, on purpose.
An XRPL memo is a small public message attached to a transaction. Live Sky writes two of them.
1. Memo type: astrobear/sky
This is the sky itself, packed into one line of plain text. The format starts with ABSKY1, a version tag, then a list of key=value pieces separated by semicolons.
loading…
Planet codes, in arc minutes
Each planet is a short code plus a longitude in arc minutes. There are 60 arc minutes in one degree, and 30 degrees in each sign, so 21600 arc minutes make a full circle. A trailing R means that body was retrograde at that moment. The South Node is not stored separately, because it is always 180 degrees from the North Node.
| Body | Arc minutes | Degrees | Sign and degree |
|---|
2. Memo type: astrobear/sky-sha256
The second memo is a SHA-256 hash of the exact sky memo text. Anyone can hash the first memo and check that the result matches. If a character got garbled, the seal would not match.
loading…
Hash check: running now…
Practice ledger, live ledger.
The XRP Ledger has a practice network called testnet, and a live network called mainnet. They look similar in an explorer, so it is worth slowing down here.
This is educational, not financial advice. Nothing on this page is a price call, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell anything.
On the testnet explorer.
Once you have an explorer link, you can read any sky snapshot the same way, including your own.
- 1
Open the example on testnet.xrpl.org, or paste a transaction hash into the testnet explorer search box.
- 2
Confirm the type is AccountSet, the result is tesSUCCESS, and the network is testnet.
- 3
Find the Memos. One should have the type astrobear/sky. That is the ABSKY1 line. The other should be astrobear/sky-sha256.
- 4
Note the ledger index and the close time. Those tell you which page of the notebook this moment belongs to.
- 5
To see the same sky on the wheel, open the snapshot in Live Sky with the
?tx=link, like this example.
Quiz, challenge, and a comic.
The Live Sky page itself does not change. Everything that teaches around it lives here, on the comic hub, and in the weekly reading posts.