Last week I posted about 7 tips to help scout locations for landscape photographers. Well, one of the blog readers (All I have of their name is their profile which reads “Missingfingers”), posted a link to a cool resource to help see cloud cover. It’s called SkippySky Astro Weather forecast. It’s actually meant to help see what the cloud cover will be like for astronomers, and anyone who wants to see the sky at night. But even if you’re not shooting at night, it can still help you figure out what the clouds will be like.
Here’s an example of the Southeast map.
The site itself isn’t flashy, and there’s a few things you could miss if you didn’t know they were there. 1) First off, after you focus in on the region you’re in, there’s links below each region that let you see various things like low, middle, or high clouds, temperature, pressure, etc…
2) Below that are links that let you jump forward a number of hours (+6, +9, +12, etc…). It looks pretty cool so I’m anxious to try it out. I’ve been pretty busy gearing up for Photoshop World next week (click here to see my classes), but I’m hoping to get out and shoot soon.
Enjoy and have a good one!
I love teaching and photography... In that order. I feel that enjoying photography, and photo editing can get WAY too complicated. So my personal mission (and favorite thing to do), is to create education that simplifies the process of taking great photos, and how to edit them to get the results you’ve always wanted.
Hi Matt,
My name’s Andrew Cool – I’m the guy behind the SkippySky Cloud forecast website.
I’d just like to point out that the site is “not flashy” on purpose. Many astrophotographers tend to run older, low end laptops out in their observatories, and I designed SkippySky to have minimal processing or download impact on such older computers that might be using a weak WiFi signal from inside their house to access the Net.
If you’ve got a nice new machine, well so much the better!
If you’ve read the Help file that’s linked to on every page, you’ll know that the source data is from NOAA, so it’s American data being fed back to America via Adelaide in South Australia.
Let me know if you have any specific questions about SkippySky.
Regards,
Andrew Cool
andrew@cool.id.au
Ha, don’t I feel fancy! Here’s some shameless self-promotion: 500px.com/adrisal