/sky condition

/sky condition [location] [remember] [outlook]

Checks current cloud cover, visibility, humidity, and wind for a location, with a plain-language verdict on how good conditions are right now (🟢 Excellent to 🔴 Poor, looking a few hours ahead too) — plus a chart of how cloud cover is forecast to change over the next 12 hours, and a separate “Tonight” verdict specifically for the astronomical darkness window (when the sky is actually dark enough for deep-sky observing), since a “right now” reading can look great in the afternoon while the coming night is forecast to be heavily clouded.

Usage: /sky condition location: Flagstaff, AZ — or just /sky condition if you’ve saved a default with /location add. Add remember: True to also save whatever location you type as your new default.

Cloud cover is broken down by altitude (low/mid/high clouds) in the text, since thin high cirrus matters less for observing than a low overcast layer — but the chart itself shows only total cloud cover, the single most actionable number, kept to one line so it’s readable at a glance. The chart’s background is shaded by day/civil twilight/nautical twilight/astronomical twilight/night (Sun altitude), so it’s visible at a glance which part of the forecast is actually dark enough to matter for observing. A second curve on its own right-hand axis shows the Moon’s altitude over the same window — solid where it’s above the horizon, dashed where it’s below — since moonlight matters for deep-sky observing just as much as cloud cover does; the “Tonight” section below names its illumination percentage and rise time directly.

A second, separate chart always accompanies the first: forecast temperature against dew point over the same window. The gap between the two lines is the actual signal — condensation forms as they converge, so a narrowing gap means rising dew risk for your optics (and, to a lesser extent, reduced transparency).

The “Tonight” section’s cloud-cover claim stays exactly as precise as before (no forecasted visibility figure exists to also factor in, unlike the current-conditions verdict) and may not appear at all for extreme high-latitude locations where astronomical darkness doesn’t occur, or if the forecast doesn’t reach far enough to find it. Its Moon line is independent of that cloud-cover claim and degrades gracefully on its own if the Moon computation ever fails, rather than being tied to whether the cloud-cover claim itself succeeded.

outlook: True adds a third chart: a 7-night cloud-cover outlook, one small square per 3-hour block shaded from dark (clear) to white (overcast), with Sun and Moon altitude curves below it on a shared axis. Deliberately opt-in, not shown by default – it costs a genuinely separate render and upload on every call, which a quick “is it clear right now” check shouldn’t have to pay for. The underlying hourly data rides along in the same Open-Meteo request this command already makes, so asking for it adds no second API call.

Parameters

Name	Required	Description
location	No	City name, decimal, or DMS coordinates. Leave blank to use your saved default.
remember	No	Also save this as your new default location (otherwise this is a one-off lookup)
outlook	No	Also show a 7-night cloud/Moon/Sun outlook chart (default: off)