Starry sky wallpaper at night (Python)

A story about making a script that changes the Windows wallpaper according to the time.

point:

• You can change the wallpaper with ctypes.windll.user32.SystemParametersInfoW.
• Infinite loop + 1 second sleep is enough for regular execution.
• Execution is good because it runs in the background when executed from pythonw (the difficulty is that it can only be stopped from the tasks manager when stopping, and the process name is pythonw and it is difficult to understand).
• If you register it as a task at startup with the task scheduler, it can be started automatically at startup.

import ctypes
import os
import datetime
import time


image_dir = r'D:\wallpaper'
current_image_name = None

while True:
    now = datetime.datetime.now()

    if now.hour < 6 or 19 <= now.hour:
        new_image_name = 'star.png'
    elif 17 <= now.hour:
        new_image_name = 'sunset.jpeg'
    else:
        new_image_name = 'daytime.jpeg'
    
    if new_image_name != current_image_name:
        abs_file_name = os.path.join(image_dir , new_image_name)
        ctypes.windll.user32.SystemParametersInfoW(20, 0,  abs_file_name, 0)
        current_image_name = new_image_name

    time.sleep(1)  # check every 1 sec

Since it flickers when switching, check for changes and execute SystemParametersInfoW only when there is a change.

It may be interesting to change it every season. It would be nice if the wallpaper looks like a window and you can feel the time and seasons.