Clear Skies?

During summer, it takes a couple of hours of driving to get to the cabin door. In winter, it’s an all-day affair that involves hours of snowshoeing or skiing up a steep trail in heavy snow without a lot of air!  So if I’m thinking about heading up there to do astronomy, it’s awfully nice to have some idea whether skies will be clear that night.

Luckily for astronomers in the USA and Canada, there’s Atilla Danko. Working closely with Allan Rahill and the Canadian Meteorological Centre, he’s developed the Clear Sky Chart. This is a quick summary of hour-by-hour forecasts of sky brightness, cloud cover, transparency, humidity, wind speed, and temperature that’s now available for over 4600 locations across North America.

Chances are there’s a Clear Sky Chart for a location near you. Find and link to it, and you can tell at a glance whether you’re going to be able to observe or image tonight. Thanks Attilla!