No matter where in the world you live, the weather is a key factor in observing astronomical objects. The only telescopes we posses that are not affected by terrestrial weather are those in space & they too are prone to other weather phenomena such as the solar wind. Living here in the North East of England we are used to the wrong sort of weather for observing, clear nights are all too often few and far between in public-observing season (September to April).

Obviously the weather has a big part to play in astronomy, both that down here on the ground & the “space weather” up there! The current weather conditions on the ground, will of course affect your decision as to whether it's worth the trip to a public or solar observing session, for example.

There are a few websites that we use to try and predict the weather in advance, we usually take a balanced view from several of them, some are specialist astronomy weather sites and others are for more general weather information. Whichever site we're looking at the most important information is of course cloud cover:

General weather

• BBC Tees
• Met Office
• Don Martin's Billingham Weather Station
• Weather Underground - Teesside

We don't call “unwanted” weather conditions “bad weather” - there's no such thing as bad weather ... just the wrong sort of clothes! Anyway, there's no point in turning up to WWP Observatory on a Friday night if it's cloudy outside, for those of you who live nearby you can stick your head out of the window. For those travelling some distance then this current weather indicator below may help:

Specialised weather

• Mappe Bolam - Static and movie images for a forecast of all kinds of weather parameters (including jetstream which affects astronomical “seeing” upto 72 hours in advance
• Meteo Blue - similar to Mappe Bolam above, but with a seperate data source and more detailed graphics (if both agree then it's usually a fairly accurate forecast)
• 7Timer Astroweather panel - detailed astronomical weather for Teesside

Space weather

We live in the atmosphere of our local star the Sun, and far from being a placid though enormous ball of gas shining it's light and warmth on our planet, it is infact a tumultuous and violent star that is constantly changing and buffeting the planets in orbit around it with it's harsh solar wind. The spaceweather.com website highlights the daily changes in the Sun-Earth system in space and our Heliophysical microsite contains many more links, resources and information about the Sun. Space weather creates wonderful phenomena such as sun spots and aurora, you can visit Lancaster University's AuroraWatch website to find out more about this and to register for e-mail aurora alerts.

Sun & Moon effects

The Sun and Moon have a strong effect on night-time observing conditions too. There is usually about 1 hour 10 minutes between sunset and darkness, called twilight, during which time only the brightest of stellar objects are visible. The local sunrise/set and moorise/set times for Teesside are given below:

The moon can drastically affect the quality to astronomical viewing, it's by far the brightest object in the night sky and can "wash-out" some of the more interesting objects on view. Dark nights with no moon are the best and the following gives details of lunar activity - combined with the rise & set times above you can plan the best time to observe (see above).

During the summer months (May to August), after sunset it doesn't get particularly dark, at the height of the summer we have more or less perpetual twilight. As a result of this the public observing season is restricted to the months of September to April, with the middle winter months being the best for public observing.