For astro-photography, dark skies are very important, but so are clear skies. Because if the sky is covered in clouds, you aren't going to get much astro-photography done. In other videos, I've shown websites for finding a dark sky, but I've never really talked about how to best predict when it'll be clear. So I thought I'd quickly review what I look for in a forecast before I decide to make the drive out to a dark site. And I'll be showing a few different forecasting websites that I've found to be good for my location in the Northeast US, like weather.gov, clear outside.com, and astrosphoric.com. And all the links for these are in the description. So here we go with my top tips, and I also have a bonus consideration at the end. My number one tip is the cloud cover forecast is the most important, because if it's cloudy, nothing else matters. I'd highly suggest not relying on one source for your cloud cover forecast. I look at several, and only when the majority of these forecasts agree that it will be clear, do I really trust it? And all these sites are basically using the same data, I think, from weather satellites, but they use different models to make the forecasts. And I found when the models all agree on it being clear, then there's a much higher chance that actually will be clear. My number two tip, for me, since I'm a mobile imager with no real protection against wind, the second most important thing to look at is the predicted wind speed. And if it's saying over 20 miles per hour all night, I'm much less likely to go out. Because I know, without protection, those wind gusts are going to give me elongated stars. Up here in the Northeast, those kinds of nights are fairly rare. But if I lived in a location where really windy nights like that were more common, I'd probably have to look into some kind of wind shelter I could quickly set up, or just bite the bullet and get an observatory. My number three tip is that the temperature and dewpoint predictions are usually pretty good. And if the dew point is within a few degrees of the air temperature, that means high humidity. And you're going to want to bring some kind of dew protection ideally, do heaters so that dew doesn't form on your optics. Because once it does, it's really hard to recover from that unless you have something like a hairdryer. And dew forms, of course, when the telescope is colder than the air temp, just like when you have a glass of ice water, and there's a little water droplet condensation forming on the outside of the glass. So the best tactic is a dew heater strip that keeps the lens or telescope just slightly warmer than the air temperature all night, and then dew should not form. My number four tip is it's good to know what transparency and seeing are, but take those forecasts with a grain of salt. I've just never found them to be super accurate. And as a deep sky photographer, I wouldn't cancel a trip just because the seeing or transparency is predicted to be poor. Because at least for my location, they're basically always poor. For anyone that doesn't know these terms, let me just quickly explain them. Seeing is what causes the stars to twinkle, or the planets to have that sort of jello effect when you're looking at them. What it is is it's the amount of turbulence in the atmosphere. And there are places on Earth where the seeing is quite good. Typically, if you are somewhere that's really flat, or if you're a very high altitude, like on a mountain top, you'll have better seeing. Flat places are good because the air doesn't have to move around big obstructions like mountains. And being on top of the mountain, like high altitude is good because then you're literally above many of the atmosphere layers and all the lower atmosphere where a lot of the nasty turbulence is happening. Transparency is, in effect, very similar to the effect of light pollution. It's a measure of how opaque or transparent the atmosphere is. And so if the sky looks brighter and murkier than normal, that would be poor transparency. And if it looks darker and clearer with more stars visible, that would be good transparency. And my understanding is the main source of transparency is humidity and moisture trapped in the atmosphere. And that's what gives us poor transparency because the light pollution is basically hitting a giant, very thin stationary cloud in a way up there. And so you're seeing through this layer of lit up moisture. I think I'm running out of time here, but my bonus consideration, especially for us North American astronomers right now, is to look at smoke forecasts because this summer has been the worst since I've started astrophotography out here on the East Coast for wildfire smoke keeping me from imaging. And so I've started paying a lot more attention to these forecasts. And what I found is that using the tool astrosphereic, if the smoke layer is showing like dense smoke, where there's a see this purple color, it's probably not worth setting up, as long as it's not dense, like not purple or red, then I'll still go for it. But to be honest, I'm still figuring this stuff out myself and where that right cutoff point is. Well, I hope this has been helpful. This has been Nico Carver with another five minute Friday, wishing you smoke free and clear skies.