The ability to see the night sky is an important part of amateur astronomy.
So to help make the planning of stargazing activities from specific locations easier a new Unity lens has been created by developer David Turner.
With a click or a button press you are able to preview location visibility data from the Clear Dark Sky website without the need to open your browser and head to the website.
Clear Dark Sky claim to offer ‘the most accurate and most usable forecasters of astronomical observing conditions’ in North America.
What Can it Do
Getting data on a location is straightforward: just open the lens and enter a location.
If numerical weather charts are supported in your queried region you will see two sets of results returned:
- ‘Clear Sky Chart’ tiles
- Current and next day night-time weather conditions
Clicking on either or the result tiles opens your default browser on the relevant cleardarksky.com page.
Download
The Clear Dark Sky lens is distributed as a .Deb installer and can be downloaded from the project’s Launchpad page @ launchpad.net/