Thanks – I am actually happy with my setup now. It doesn’t need to be on the minute – all I want is that the “night light” switches on when it gets dark and switches off when the sun comes up. That works pretty flawlessly for almost a year now – never change a running system they say … 😉

The idea with pause sounds pretty interesting – thanks for the input / idea. I might give it a try if my setup shall stop working …

https://github.com/jgillick/python-pause

import pause

pause.until(dusk)
# Night Light ON code
pause.until(sunrise)
# Night Light OFF code

I’m working on something similar to yourself and having discovered Astral via your blog starting looking for a more robust timing method.
I’m not that practiced at Python and coding bulletproof time code gives me a headache!
Pause takes into account time zones so I can run my Pi in local time and use UTC for time calculations, but I haven’t tested it yet.

Thanks for a great write up on Astral!

Simon