Tap Weather on the home screen for a 16-day astronomical forecast of every observing site – the same Open-Meteo data and the same seeing, transparency, and cloud scoring as the desktop app’s weather panel, tuned for a phone screen. Decide from anywhere whether tonight is worth opening the dome.
Choosing a Site #
Chips across the top list your observing sites, taken from the imaging systems in your cloud account (each system carries its site’s latitude and longitude). Tap a chip to load that site’s forecast; the app remembers your last choice. If the list is empty, open the desktop app and let it sync – the systems, with their coordinates, travel to the cloud from there.
Reading the Chart #
The chart scrolls sideways through all 16 days, about a day at a time, and opens positioned at the current moment. Top to bottom:
- Sun & Moon – altitude waves with sunrise/sunset times and a moon phase icon over each night.
- Overall – the headline strip: one combined night-quality score weighing clouds most heavily (60%), then seeing and transparency (20% each). Darker blue is better, in every strip.
- High / Mid / Low – cloud cover by deck. Low cloud blocks, mid cloud dims, thin high cirrus mostly softens – the Overall score weights them accordingly.
- Seeing – estimated from jet-stream and mid-level winds, surface gusts, and atmospheric instability.
- Transp – transparency from humidity and aerosol optical depth.
- Wind – direction vanes colored by speed, with the peak sustained wind printed below.
- Temp / Dew – temperature and dew point curves; the dew line shifts toward red as the gap closes and dew becomes a real risk.
Days in the bottom band run midnight to midnight, but the data columns are arranged noon-to-noon so each night sits whole in the middle of its column – no night is ever split across two days.
The Imaging Window and the Now Marker #
Faint dashed verticals mark where the sun crosses your imaging twilight – dusk to dawn – with the twilight name printed in each window. The threshold comes from your own targets at that site: the most permissive twilight type among them (Civil, Nautical, or Astronomical; Astronomical if the site has no targets), so the window matches what the scheduler will actually use.
A red line marks right now, labeled with the site’s local time – handy when the observatory sits in a different time zone than you do.
Tap for Details #
Tap any hour to pop up the numbers behind the colors: the overall rating, cloud cover split by deck, seeing and transparency ratings, wind with gusts and compass direction, and temperature, dew point, and humidity. Tap again (or scroll) to dismiss it.
Units and Refreshing #
The °C / °F toggle in the header switches temperatures and wind speeds between metric and imperial; the choice sticks. Forecasts are cached for 30 minutes per site so flipping between sites is instant – the Refresh button in the toolbar forces a fresh fetch.