moon & darkness for any night · clouds up to 2 weeks out
Where to go tonight
ranked best to worst — the top of the list is your best bet
Checking tonight's clouds across the Hill Country…
How to read the sky
Three things decide a night. We check all three for every spot and show you each one, so you can make the call yourself.
1. DarknessHow dark the spot actually is — the one thing that never changes. We look each location up once on the world light-pollution atlas (the Bortle scale) and store it. The canyons out west are genuinely dark; the towns near San Antonio and Austin carry more city glow. Darkness sets the ceiling — clouds and the moon can only bring a night down from there.
2. CloudsHow cloudy it'll be over that exact spot tonight. This is the live piece: we pull the hourly cloud forecast from Open-Meteo — the same free weather service behind the river and town pages — and average the hours that fall inside tonight's dark window.
3. The moonHow bright the moon is, and whether it's above the horizon during tonight's dark hours. A full moon overhead washes out even the darkest sky. We compute this for tonight from the spot's coordinates — no forecast needed, it's just astronomy.