🔭 Atacama Desert — Night of Aug 10–11, 2026

Verdict: A pristine Bortle 2 sky, completely smothered. Not a single hour from 20:00 to 01:00 passes the weather thresholds — 100% cloud cover all night long. Here's the hour-by-hour misery (and promise):

🌡️ Hour-by-hour conditions

• 20:00 – Fully overcast (100%), rain odds at 80%, temp −5.2°C, wind 3.4 m/s. Not a crack in the ceiling.
• 21:00 – Still 100% covered, precip easing slightly to 77%, wind dropping to 2.2 m/s. Visibility starting to slip (10 km).
• 22:00 – ⚠️ The worst hour: fog surges to 74%, visibility crashes to 2.6 km, precip 75%. Zero chance.
• 23:00 – Fog vanishes, visibility recovers to 16 km, but clouds hold at 100%. Precip now 72%. Wind dying to 0.6 m/s.
• 00:00 – Cold continues its slide to −6.8°C. Cloud cover locked at 100%, precip 66%.
• 01:00 – The "best" of a bad night: precip down to 60%, wind ~1.1 m/s, but still solid overcast at −7.3°C. No meteor showers active to save you.

✨ What the sky wants to show you

• Moon: Waning Crescent, only ~4% illuminated, and already set at 16:06 — no lunar interference for deep-sky. Perfect timing… if only the clouds would part.
• Saturn (mag 0.58): transits at 04:08 — prime ring-planet window in the early hours.
• Venus (mag −4.22!): was an evening beacon, but it transited at 15:26 and is long gone.
• ISS flyby at 19:17 — the one bright streak you might catch before the cloud deck fully locks in.

🎯 Targets for the next clear night

The classic Atacama summer lineup is waiting: globulars M13 (Hercules), M4 and M22 (toward the galactic core), the glorious open-cluster pair M6 & M7, and the grand M24 star cloud — all sitting right in the Milky Way's richest zone.

Bottom line: The air is calm, the desert is cold and dark, but tonight belongs to the clouds. Treat this as a planning session — with the Moon approaching new, the next clear night in this location will be an absolute gem. 🌌