Night sky tonight in Atacama Desert

Tonight's Atacama forecast: a narrow golden window at midnight

The desert is playing hard to get tonight — not a uniformly clear sky, but a race against the clouds with one exceptional hour. Here's how conditions evolve hour by hour (local time, UTC-3):

• 21:00 — Clouds dominate at 61%, with a 12% precipitation chance and a 6 km/h breeze. Sky mostly veiled; not a good hour.
• 22:00 — Clouds ease to 54%, precipitation drops to 9%, wind calms to 4.3 km/h. Still marginal.
• 23:00 — Clouds thin to 46%, precip down to 7%, wind fades to 2.4 km/h. Getting close...
• 00:00 (midnight) — The window opens. Clouds fall to 39%, precipitation hits 0%, and the wind dies to under 1 km/h. This is your hour — the only fully "good" hour of the night, at a crisp −1.3°C.
• 01:00 — Clouds surge back to 58%. The window slams shut as quickly as it opened, even as the temperature plunges to −2.9°C.

The silver lining: The Moon is a Waning Crescent at just 8.5% illumination and set at 20:24 — it's below the horizon all night. Combined with Bortle 2 skies, you get pristine, moonless darkness.

Planets: - Saturn (mag 0.57) transits at 22:49 — prime viewing right as the clouds thin out. - Uranus (mag 5.6) transits at 02:21, but that's after the cloud deck rolls back in. Try to catch it earlier if you can.

Top targets for the window: - M7 (Ptolemy Cluster) and M6 (Butterfly Cluster) — bright southern open clusters (mag 4.1 and 5.3) riding high in the Milky Way's heart. - M22 — a magnificent globular cluster (mag 5.1) toward the galactic bulge. - M24 — the Sagittarius Star Cloud, a naked-eye patch of thousands of stars. - If the sky holds longer: M42 (Orion Nebula) rising in the east, and M45 (Pleiades) for a wide-field treat.

Strategy: Set up early, queue your targets, and observe hard between 23:30 and 00:45. The transparency of a moonless Bortle 2 sky in that window will be spectacular — if you catch it.