ATLAS Tonight's Sky

ATLAS answers one question: what is actually worth imaging from your backyard tonight?

Tell it where you are, and it scores every deep sky object above your horizon by weighing the six factors that go into whether a target is worth the night: altitude, separation from the moon, moon illumination, sky brightness at your site, how long the object stays inside your imaging window, and where it sits in its season.

You get a ranked answer in a few seconds, instead of an hour of cross referencing three apps and a weather site.

WHAT IS INSIDE

Tonight's Best A ranked list of targets scored for your location, your date, and the actual forecast. Open any object to see its altitude curve, transit time, angular size, magnitude, and a plain reading of why it scored the way it did.

An interactive 3D sky More than 55,000 objects from real astronomical catalogs, drawn on a dome you can spin, zoom, and scrub through time. Watch the whole night play out before you carry a single piece of gear up to the roof.

Conditions Hourly cloud cover and temperature for your exact coordinates, plus moon phase, moonrise and moonset, and every stage of twilight. Forecast data comes from Open-Meteo.

Gear aware framing Enter your telescope and camera and ATLAS shows each target framed the way your rig will actually see it, so you know before you slew whether it fills the sensor or disappears in it.

Search anything Messier, NGC, IC, Caldwell, Sharpless, common names. Find it, fly to it, and see when it is highest.

DATA AND CREDITS

Star data from the HYG Database v3.8 (CC BY-SA 2.5), compiled by David Nash from the Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star, and Gliese catalogs. Deep sky data from OpenNGC v2024.02 (CC BY-SA 4.0), compiled by Mattia Verga. Solar system positions, twilight, and moon phase from astronomy-engine. Weather from Open-Meteo. Location names from OpenStreetMap and Nominatim.

Made by M102 Astro. m102astro.com