Cheap Astronomy – Things That Are Free: Meteoblue's "Astronomical Seeing" Prediction

When I prepared myself for the Triple Conjuction, I had to drive to another site – so I wanted to know beforehand how the weather would be, and especially if there were clouds or not.

One thing I found mildly helpful was looking into nearby airports. I have two small airstrips near by, and both have some interesting weather information. One is military and has some cloud predictions, the other is a small private one with temperature and dew point record for the last 24h, plus current webcam images

Since then I tried to find a website which is more dedicated to weather in the context of astronomical seeing. Of course one immediately finds the "Clear Sky Chart" website and Weather Underground's Astronomy service – but unfortunately they cater mainly to the continental US and Canada.

I then searched some more and found the "Astronomical Seeing" service by Meteoblue. Until now I have mainly used their cloud prediction and found it to be quite reliable.They have many more features (like "seeing"), and I hope to utilize them in the future – but I am neither proficient enough nor have I used it other informtion to comment on the quality of their "seeing" information.

Sow what else do they offer? They offer quite some information, with hourly resolution for three days. Most of it presented in color, so one can immediately grasp what one has to expect for the next days.

The Meteoblue information for the current day for a semi-randomly selected city in Russia – things like daytime/nighttime and cloudcover are immediately obvious. Notice the "mouse-over" with planet information in the lower right corner.

The information about astronomical weather they display is:

• Cloudcover (low, mid and high)
• Different seeing indices (different calculation methods)
• Jet stream and "bad" layers
• Temperature and humidity

Furthermore they show some information about our Solar System:

• Daily Sun rise and Sun set
• Daily Moon rise, Moon set and Moon phase (both as number and as text)
• Hourly information for visible planets* (with coordinates via "mouse over")

It is all presented very nicely and I usually look once a day to know if I should prepare for an astronomical session (or not).

*All eight planets except the Earth – duh – plus the dwarf planet Pluto.