Session planner
Is tonight worth it?
Enter where you’re observing from, and the planner tells you whether tonight is worth setting up for. If it is, it suggests what to point your telescope at, and when. If the sky won’t cooperate, it says so. Nocturne then turns what you capture into a finished picture.
On a first visit nothing about where you observe from is sent until you press Plan tonight or Use my location. Then your location goes to Open-Meteo, the weather service, and nowhere else: first the place name exactly as you typed it, to find its coordinates, then those coordinates, rounded to about a kilometre, for the forecast. Typed coordinates skip the first step. The planner remembers your location in your browser, so the next time you open this page it plans straight away. This site’s own visit count records only your country, never your town. What this page does with your data.
“Show in sky” draws the sky from the Hipparcos star catalogue (ESA), OpenNGC (M. Verga, CC BY-SA 4.0) with its hand-traced nebula outlines, simplified, the Sharpless and Barnard nebula catalogues via CDS VizieR, constellation lines from Stellarium’s modern sky culture (CC BY-SA 4.0), the ESO Milky Way panorama by S. Brunier (CC BY 4.0), the Moon map by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (LRO, public domain), and survey images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (produced at STScI under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166, from plates of the Palomar Oschin and UK Schmidt telescopes; full acknowledgement). Photos are by the Nocturne community, credited where they appear. We are not affiliated with any of them. It needs a browser with WebGL2.