Clear Night Coach

Clear Night Coach

About this app

The sky clears, the gear is ready, and the hard part starts: choosing. Clear Night Coach makes the choice for you. One screen gives you the night's verdict, a hero target picked for your telescope, camera and site, and coach narration explaining why — with a rise, transit and set timeline so you know when to start.

The full decision engine runs on your phone. Every verdict is computed on-device, not in the cloud, so the app keeps working at a dark site with no signal.

It also refuses to bluff: cached forecasts age honestly — an older forecast is badged as such, and once it's too old to trust, the verdict word is withheld instead of faked. Ranking by sky geometry and moon still works regardless.


WHAT YOU GET

• TONIGHT
Verdict, hero target, sky and moon in one look.

• PLAN B
Clouds arrived mid-session? A fresh pick for the remaining night in about half a second.

• TARGETS
The top five galaxies, nebulae and clusters for tonight, the night's comets alongside, plus full-catalogue search that will tell you no, with reasons ("too big for your sensor · poorly placed").

• SKY MAP
Plan-view dome and a zoomable finder chart — real Hipparcos stars, our own constellation figures, Telrad rings, your camera-frame outline, and star-hop directions worked out from a named signpost star. Red night-vision mode.

• COMETS
A nightly timely list with hedged magnitudes and capture advice.

• CONDITIONS
Moon phase and illumination, darkness ladder, hourly cloud bands, wind, dew and seeing — expired inputs are dropped, never dressed up.

• ALERTS
A daily 4 pm verdict, a cloud-clear alert when a NO-GO turns GO during the evening, optional moon-window reminders, and supernova alerts.

• WIDGET
Tonight's verdict on your home screen, upfront about when it was last checked.

• SITES
Keep several locations and compare them side by side — worth the drive, or not? Each site has its own horizon map, so your trees and hills count against a target.

• EQUIPMENT
Smart-scope presets (Seestar, DWARF and more) or a full rig — optics, camera, filters, mount — with sub-exposure guidance tuned to what you own.

• PREVIEWS
DSS survey images framed at your exact field of view.

• SESSION LOG
With yearly stats.


PRO

Clear Night Coach is free to use. Pro features require a paid licence and are unlocked by entering your licence key in the app.


ANYWHERE ON EARTH

The engine works anywhere on Earth, with a full-sky catalogue and a hand-picked set of showpiece targets for both hemispheres — Northern and Southern alike.

Made in Australia. A Windows desktop version is available from the Microsoft Store.

What’s new

Telescope or camera not in the list? Type its name and enter the numbers yourself, in setup or in Settings › Equipment, where camera sensor details are now editable too.

Wind no longer cuts sub-exposures short on an equatorial mount.

Smart telescope cards now read "Managed by the scope". Fixed: the
Equipment page could show one mount setting and save another.

Logged targets now rest for 60 days, so a recent one may drop off tonight's list.