It sits in the Mac's menu bar and refreshes the forecast every 30 minutes. An hour before sunset it sends one notification, and only if there is an unbroken run of clear sky in astronomical darkness long enough to image in. Otherwise it says nothing: no news means "clouds".
I hope this is useful for other hobbyist stargazers too!
When I was a child I wanted desperately to be an astronaut or a dinosaur. I'm now old enough to be the latter and was born in a country where the former was never an option. I've had a fascination with the stars since a a friend of my father gifted me a telescope, and have faded memories of sharing time with my father staring at the stars. My father passed away a few years back and the memory of those nights came back, along with the want to share the same experience with my kids and grandchild.
The app uses two forecasts: Apple's WeatherKit is the main source and Open-Meteo is a second opinion. When they disagree, the alert says so instead of averaging them.
Thin high cloud counts for half. Stacking many short frames works through a veil of cirrus, so treating it as full cloud threw away usable nights.
It works on your own horizon: hills come from terrain data, and you set the houses and trees in each direction, so they are accounted for when it says what is up.
It works out, a year ahead, when the Moon will pass in front of a planet, a bright star or the Pleiades as seen from your site.
You don't need an account. What leaves the Mac is the coordinates of the place being forecast, sent to the forecast and sky-survey services listed in PRIVACY.md.
Limits: Mac only, and the aurora alerts are UK only. The worldwide light-pollution data is new this week. I have checked it against Britain's finer grid and a handful of cities, so I would especially like to hear from people elsewhere whether the darkness it suggests for your site looks right.
Keyboard navigation, the ability to change text-size, and voiceover support will all be in the next version.
It’s a shame because years ago macOS had the perfect place for “quick information at a glance” apps: the Dashboard. But the Dashboard got killed off in mysterious circumstances, and I still miss it!
I had hopes that something like Dashboard would make a comeback with the advent of the new widgets framework, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Widgets can only be buried in Notification Centre (where they get lost and forgotten, buried under all the notifications) or on the desktop (same, plus needless clutter).
Apple, please bring back Dashboard!
For iOS stargazers that don't already know (we've all been there) xasteria is a great option for your phone to compliment this (it also uses 7Timer!).
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xasteria-astronomy-weather/id9...
I might have a look at a Windows version in future, but don't have access to a PC at the moment. The code is open source on Github if anyone wanted to make an alternative version in the meantime. Nightwatch does make use of the Mac's location services and Apple Weather, but these should be easy to swap out. I don't know whether widgets ever made it back to the desktop on Windows, so anyone looking at porting it over might need to change the widget into a standard dialog.
You'd better be north of Leeds to be saying things like that. :) Cool app.
Without doxxing myself, I'm based in a village on the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales.
The biggest problem I found with weather forecasting is that most people want to know whether it's cloudy/raining overhead. I want to know if it's cloudy and raining somewhere near the horizon :D
From there, if you have found out that you enjoy being outside using the binoculars, can see what you expected... then buy a compact scope
see https://telescopicwatch.com/different-types-of-telescopes/
I have two sets of cheap (<$100) binoculars, a cheap refractor from amazon (gskyer, $300), a very nice celestron c8 and a small meade MCT. I bought them in that order as I developed my interests. I use two different eye pieces, both plossals, one with about an inch of eye relief with no eyecup and one with a bit less relief and an eyecup. I use the binoculars more than all the others combined and if I were starting over I would buy a really nice set with a tripod.
For planets and nebulae I use the c8 with an equitorial mount. This is _fantastic_ for general objects in the night sky since once it's aligned it's a single knob to turn to keep up with things as the earth is rotating. For the moon and large planets and tracking things like space craft launching or starlink sats I use the refractor with the standard azimuth tripod. It makes it very easy to manually "point and shoot" objects with irregular travel paths.
So yea... go buy some binoculars.