Actual Step

Weather Planning

Updated: 2023-03-16

Purpose

Plan your next astro night session carefully in advance and use, among other things, weather data from which the visual conditions (visibility, clouds, moisture, wind)

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Target Planning

Meteoblue

As an example of a weather or sky condition planning tool you can use Meteoblue (provided by Meteoblue AG, Basel -CH), a tool that provides most of the information you need.


Also check the phase of the moon and the distance between the moon and your target. Unfortunately, our skies are not clear enough to ignore the influence of the moon. Meteoblue helps you to find out if the nights will be dark enough or not. See the example below: next Friday night you can expect 3 relatively dark skies between 20:00 and 23:00, but with some low haze. After the moon rises at 23:19 the sky will be quite lit by the moon and may not allow to take pictures of very faint objects (fainter than mag 5).


meteoblue

Clear Outside

Another useful astronomy weather forecasting tool is Clear Outside (provided by First Light Optics, Exeter, Devon in the UK), also available as app on iOS and Android:



See also the explanations of the term Seeing.

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