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Clear Outside Weather Forecasts for Astronomers


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That's a great site, a welcome resource.

Thanks from all of us frustrated UK astronomers. Very nice of you to give something back (again!).

Cheers

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 This is a great gesture, really practical and full credit to everyone at FLO :angel:  :angel13:

Now we can know, absolutely, for sure, without any doubt whatsoever, that it's going to be cloudy - every day! :grin:  :grin:  :p

Seriously, many thanks, guys and girls :cool:

Dave

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PS: This is also a good time to publicly thank our beta-testers for their advice and input. We really appreciated your thoughts  :icon_salut:

PSS: Clear Outside is a long-term project, this is only Version-1, so we are keen to hear your thoughts and suggestions. And if you have any questions we will do our best to answer them  :smile:

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I'd put this on my favourites bar a couple of nights ago and decided to give it the maiden voyage so to speak, last night.

The setup is good and the level of information is very comprehensive - It's a nice format to view.

On the other hand, and no reflection on you guys, I am pleased to report that it's as hopelessly inaccurate as all the other weather predicting services :grin:

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Good site, but.. I do not see any seeing data...?

Good question :)

We do not currently provide a measure of the seeing in terms of arc seconds etc... for a few reasons - any place that does offer this already, will say somewhere that it's experimental and unvalidated - there is no definitive algorithm for calculating seeing in this way so we've not focussed on this for phase one - it's something we may look into as a future addition but, we will probably not use this measure when calculating the hourly traffic light colour because with the skies and weather we have in this country, a clear night is already a lot to ask for, so a clear night with perfect seeing is very hard to come by!

Cheers,

Grant

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I'd put this on my favourites bar a couple of nights ago and decided to give it the maiden voyage so to speak, last night.

The setup is good and the level of information is very comprehensive - It's a nice format to view.

On the other hand, and no reflection on you guys, I am pleased to report that it's as hopelessly inaccurate as all the other weather predicting services :grin:

A lot of testing has happened in the background comparing the forecast with reality, and the results have been good but, as you say with any forecast, weather prediction is notoriously hard!

To try and improve this, we will be building in a feedback mechanism so we can keep track of peoples actual results vs the forecasts. This will hopefully allow us to track how accurate the forecast is vs when the forecast was made. It also may help us find ways to improve the forecasts and spot area specific trends that we can build in.

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Is there an option to increase the number of green boxes? Might be a problem with my laptop, but there appear to be too many red boxes?

#weatherinducedsobbing 

We are really sorry but the big 'Clear My Skies Now' button didn't make it into version one. It's currently scheduled for an April 1st 2015 launch :D

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Excellent job FLO it was nice to meet you all at the IAS, will this be available as an App as well?

Mel

Yes :) - hopefully for both Android and IOS.

For now, the site is responsive and will adapt to varying screen sizes so it should at least be usable on all devices but, the level of data shown will be reduced on small screens so that it's still readable.

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Brilliant idea! This is always a source of frustration, going to multiple weather sites and getting multiple responses, some of which are not astro specific or minded with their forecasts, so it's great to see one being added that is. Cheers FLO!

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I'd put this on my favourites bar a couple of nights ago and decided to give it the maiden voyage so to speak, last night.

It is impressive that you found it Sara   :icon_salut:

The site was made live 6am Saturday to coincide with the International Astronomy Show. We have been testing it ourselves for weeks but wanted to be 100% sure before mentioning it here. 

Steve 

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