About
A small set of reference pages kept for personal use, put online because a bookmark on one machine is never the machine you have with you.
Four pages, covering the things worth checking before an evening outside: meteor shower peaks, which planets are up and whether they are worth the trouble, and the handful of ideas that explain why one clear night shows far more than another.
There is deliberately no forecast, no ephemeris generator and no star chart here. Those exist elsewhere, maintained by people with the data to keep them correct. What is here is the background you need in order to read them.
Shower dates and rates follow the published annual meteor calendars; planetary magnitudes and periods are standard values found in any observing handbook. All of them are rounded, and several shift slightly from year to year. They are meant for planning an evening, not for anything that depends on precision.
Peak dates in particular are given to the nearest day. The actual maximum can arrive several hours either side, which is why the advice throughout is to go out on both nights when a shower matters to you.
If something here is wrong, it is worth telling me: notes@space.invisiblenet.click. Corrections to the tables are especially welcome.
No analytics, no cookies, no accounts, no fonts or scripts loaded from anywhere else. The pages are static files; the server keeps ordinary access logs and nothing more.