FLO

Funny you should say that because that option has already been built but isn't switched on. Grant was saying only yesterday it is his preferred view and it does make sense so we we'll make it live soon. Perhaps even later today. The 'Centre on Midnight' and 'Centre on Midday' options will remain Steve

Most of the attention at the moment is on the Astronomy Tools website launched yesterday but we haven't forgotten Clear Outside We have made some minor changes intended to make the forecast easier to use and faster to load: A number of people have asked for the Moon info bar to be larger, so that has been done. If you hover over the day bar you will see a popup with the Sun rise/set times. This feature now also works on touch devices (rather than hover, on touch devices you touch the bar for info). The same is true if you hover/touch on the Moon phase box. Clear Outside now auto-updates ISS passover details for locations that have been viewed in the past 7 days (the server will check every minute for locations that have been viewed in the past 7 days to see if it’s ISS data needs to be regenerated and if it does, it will do it). Previously the data was calculated/updated each time the page was loaded, which caused a delay. This will benefit those who check their forecasts at least once a week, they will notice the page loads much more quickly. The next significant update will be embeddable images that people can put in their forum signature or personal website showing their location's forecasts. Thank-you for using Clear Outside and for recommending it to friends

We will, and more We have also included a button that enables you to add new eyepieces, cameras and telescopes of your choice.

Sara, we dismissed the idea in an earlier stage of development, mostly because the images were slow to load, but I have asked Grant to put the function back so you can try it If you go to the FOV calculator page you will find a new search box (top-right) that loads images from the Digitized Sky Survey. Loading images will be slower but you now have access to the entire NGC, IC, Caldwell and Messier catalogues. Please try it then let us know what you think. HTH, Steve

Ah, we tried using live DSS images but had reservations because they can be quite slow loading. We will look into it again sometime but for now our preference is to add our own catalogue images to ensure they load quickly. What catalogues would you most like us to include Sara? I am also a fan of David Campbell's 12Dstring FOV calculator having found it useful a number of times over the years Steve

Hi Sara We can add whatever you like but this is only day one and we were confident the Messier objects would be most popular so launched with those. We will add more over time. I'm not sure what you mean by "In others they seem to link up to the DSS"? Please keep in mind we are not competing with other sites. The Astronomy Tools website is non-commercial so if it proves popular our reward will be only the personal satisfaction of knowing we contributed. Steve

For the imagers we have just added a CCD Calculators page with a CCD Resolution calculator, CCD Pixel Size calculator and a CCD Chip Size Calculator. The latter not only provides vertical and horizontal measurements but also the diagonal measurement often missed from manufacturer's product descriptions - useful when considering a telescope's imaging circle and when choosing filters.

We have just added Limiting Magnitude and Light Grasp calculators to the Telescope Capabilities page The Light Grasp calculator is fun. You can use it to compare two telescopes of different apertures, a telescope vs binocular or even a telescope vs your eye. For example the Skywatcher Skyliner 200p Dobsonian gathers approx 6.44x more light than an Evostar 80ED, 16.48x more than a 10x50 binocular and 841x more than the human eye!

We launched it only an hour ago and already 10x new telescopes, 4x new cameras and 2x new eyepieces have been submitted. Thank-you Steve

Thank-you Our weather forecast for astronomers website took longer. We are all astronomers here at FLO (except the ladies in dispatch) so it has been a joint effort but Grant (our IT Manager) is the man behind the technical wizardry And Steve Richards (aka Steppenwolf) kindly agreed to kick it's tires during development. Thank-you Steve

Yes Over time we will enter details for all our telescopes, eyepieces and cameras. We have also included a button that enables you to add your own equipment. It doesn't need to be equipment available at FLO, we have made it a non-commercial stand-alone website so please feel free to add whatever equipment you like. Steve

A quick note and a thank-you We have intentionally designed the site for use with the latest versions of browsers. This enables us to use a number of advanced web technologies that might not work in older versions of some browsers. I.e. we are using ‘Canvas' for the FOV calculator that enables us to create drawings dynamically within the website. This would not be possible if we built something compatible with older browsers. Also with the FOV calculator in mind we would like to say a special thank-you to the team behind Cartes du Ciel for making such an impressive open-source application. It has enabled us to draw sky charts for our FOV calculator which includes data from many catalogues of stars, galaxies and nebulae. Steve

It is remarkable how many astronomy resources, tools and calculators are freely available online. Here at FLO we routinely use a number of them when answering questions regarding magnification, field of view, sensor size, focal length, f-ratio, exit pupil, etc. Also for more general questions like 'what is in the sky tonight' and ‘where will I find it'. With this in mind we decided to build our own in-house collection of astronomy tools and calculators. We reasoned having our own together in one place would save time and we would be able to develop and improve them, or at least build them so they best suited our needs. The project is going well and a number of the tools and calculators have been built and, in the spirit of other online resources and calculators, we are making them available free of charge Astronomy Tools The project is a work in progress so you will find the paint is still wet in places and there will be some typos but we will continue to build, develop and polish the site. We might even design a logo! If you find a bug please let us know so we can squish it. Please also let us know if you have any suggestions or would like something included. We hope you find it a useful resource. Regards, The FLO team

I would like a trip to the US but we don't sell Orion telescopes so I'll need to think of another excuse Steve

Loving this barbecue weather

We released Clear Outside only one week ago and already it has generated 7473 forecasts over 961 locations. We are really pleased to see so many people kicking it's tyres. Thank-you

No problem Kerry

It hasn't cost you anything. It is a gift Regarding feedback, we will be building in a feedback mechanism so we can keep track of peoples actual results vs the forecasts. This will hopefully enable us to further improve the forecasts and spot area specific trends. I don't follow football so didn't know we had lost until you mentioned it but James and SteveB watched the match and say we played well so hopefully things will improve from here on. Thank-you Steve

I will arrange a full and immediate refund... Seriously, we are a retailer, we don't own our own weather satellites or balloons. We can only buy the best and most up-to-date weather data and deliver it to you in a useful, reliable and convenient form. Whilst no weather forecasting system can deliver 100% accuracy we have compared Clear Outside's forecasts vs actual weather over a number of weeks prior to launch and the results were good. We hope if you do the same you will be impressed but if not you can simply delete the bookmark and go back to whatever other system you were using ATB, Steve

Don't worry Stephen, we have the perfect solution Steve

We have noticed some blogs and astronomy societies are already doing this. They are listing Clear Outside links at their websites so their members can easily check a number of observing sites. Here are some for fun: FLO HQ SGL Star party Kelling Kielder Les Granges (Olly's place) HTH, Steve

It is impressive that you found it Sara 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

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

"It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages." Henry Ford First Light Optics is only one month away from her seventh birthday. With your support, we have grown from a single person working from home to a team of seven operating from two units on a business park in Exeter. We could not have done this without you, so we are hugely grateful. Earlier this year, we began wondering how to give something back to the community. We already sponsor Stargazerslounge, which benefits its members and others searching for info. But many of our customers don't belong to this or any other forum. We considered emailing all our customers a one-off discount code, but that felt wrong because it would benefit only those in a position to buy. Then Grant came up with an elegant idea - a weather forecast for astronomers. Of course, other forecast sites are available with an astronomy theme, but often, they use only a single freely available data source or, worse, scrape data from other sites. And they tend to be built on a budget, so they don't update frequently enough to be useful or provide limited information, so you need to visit multiple sites to obtain a full picture. So, we decided to build the best weather forecast site focused entirely on astronomy and to release it free of charge. Clear Outside Weather Forecasts for Astronomers Here are some key features: Hourly forecasts, updated hourly. Easy-to-understand traffic-light indicators with a drop-down menu for those wanting more information. Without giving too much away, we use an aggregate of several weather models, including the UK Met Office, the Norwegian Met Office and the American NOAA. We have invested in commercial weather data services and a dedicated infrastructure to provide the most reliable, up-to-date forecast and long-term stability. Detailed Sun and Moon rise, set and meridian data are accurately modelled on your location. Similarly, we have integrated the ISS pass over times and other information modelled on your precise longitude and latitude. For more information, please click the 'How to Use' button and take the tour. We have also included a 'Contact Us' page where you can make suggestions and leave feedback and a ‘Road Map’ page where we will detail upgrades and developments we are working on. Clear Outside is our gift to you, the astronomy community, for your support over the years. We hope you like it Regards, SteveG, Annette, James, Grant, Lisa, Martin & SteveB.

I use a number of binoculars but for astronomy my mainstays are the 10x50 Opticron Imagic TGA WP and a 10x50 Barr & Stroud Monocular that I keep in the car glove compartment. I could wax lyrical about the Imagic but you'll probably think I am trying to sell it so I'll just say it suits me very well. The B&S monocular is also popular with our young sons when we go on walks because they haven't the patience to setup a regular binocular. For daytime use I recently started using a 9x32 Pentax DCF BC. My wife likes that one too. Steve