LED Light Controller Help

So I have an aquarium that I'm going to build a LED light for. I know how my layout and everything will look, however I don't want a simple dimmer that is manual, I would like to build one that will automatically simulate a type of sunrise, sunset, control a seperate set of LED for a moonlight cycle and a strand for different weather such as cloudy or even thunderstorms. I know it can be done as I have seen a card that did most of it, however the way it was put together will not work on a fixture that contains more than 8 LEDs because he had the current drivers on the card itself. I would like to build a card that I plug the current drivers into and it controls it that way but I don't even know where to begin or what the diagram would look like for such a card. Can someone help me please?

You will want to use a micro controller like a PIC to generate PWM which will control the power going to the leds. This will allow you to program any sequence of intensities and color mixes.

Do you know any computer language ?