Understanding the sky and the atmosphere

This page is found under both tabs "(Space)Weather" and "Photography" as both are logical spots to place it.

You can of course go out on a clear night and start shooting anything in the sky. At least I did. You just have to start sometime somewhere. And you know... that is the way to do it. Start! No start means no result whatsoever...

Your viewing location in the darkness:

For DeepSky, planetary and lunar.
The first thing to consider at any given location is getting in between the object of your interest and any light source/polution. So if Andromeda is your target and east of you, go east from your city. If there is another city on that eastern end look for a place to get it out of your view. Those light domes are pure evil.
Having said that of course you want to be in an environment that is as dark as you can get it. There is quite a difference between the Westland Greenhouses near The Hague in my hometown country The Netherlands and the deserted space in... well let's say a desert...😉. The first one being near impossible to use and the latter really ideal. Problem: the latter is somewhat inconvenient remote...
These places have so called Bortle values from 1 (ideal) to 9 (bad. As in roughly practically useless). But that is only about light pollution. My app of choice: Lightpollution.info also for iOs and Android.

Seeing
Another problem is air turbulence which some weather apps mention as "seeing". Specifically the jetstream but of course in summer the heat that our planet radiates out in the night will make it hard to get good sharp images. A way to tell this is by looking at how much the stars twinkle because... stars don't do that! It is the turbulence of the air that makes them look like they do. More turbulence -> the more they seem to twinkle. My app of choice for iOS is Xasteria+. It has 3 apps directly accessible and 8 alternatives. In my opinion the best you can get and both Windy and Lightpolution are amongst those 8 alternative. I have no idea if this is available to Android.

Clouds
And then there is of course the definite game breaker: clouds. No need to talk about that other than my advice to find a weather app that you trust. My app of choice is Windy which I find very reliable and is also for iOS and Android.

This is an example of an Airgram by the Windy app. It shows multi layer cloud cover per hour along with multi layer wind direction and speed. The faster the airflow the more turbulence the worse the seeing.


The Weatherkipedia a Dutch web page extensively explaning weather jargon.

For solar.
Early in the morning some 10 meters above the ground looking over a lake or grassland or forrest produces the least turbulence in the air. Low to the ground any residual radiation of heat from the day before will be very low and absorbed by the cool atmosphere. This will improve your "seeing" significantly.