What's coming

Skyvera reads the hour-by-hour forecast, the Moon, and the light over your own town, and tells you whether tonight is worth it. When it is, it tells you where to look: a direction, an hour, and what the thing you are looking for actually looks like.

It can name a meteor shower, an eclipse, the Moon sitting beside a planet, a pass of the Space Station, and the Milky Way on the nights the sky lets it through.

It also keeps the diary of the good nights in the year ahead, for your own place. That stays free: it is the arithmetic of the sky, not a forecast.

And most evenings, it says nothing at all.

Sending your evening card to someone. It was drawn to be sent from the start; only the button is missing.

Being told the day before a great night, rather than on the night itself. A shower peaking at three in the morning is something you would rather hear about at dinner the evening before.

A widget on your home screen: the evening's verdict without opening the app and without a notification. It is where an app that would rather keep quiet ends up.

The northern lights, done properly. Everyone alerts on an index that covers the whole of Europe, when the only question that matters is whether the sky above you is clear.

More than one place: the holiday house, your parents', the spot you found twenty minutes away.

And somewhere to keep the nights you went out for.

No advertising.

No account to create.

No notification sent to bring you back. Skyvera writes only when there is a reason to go outside, and it will go on telling you to stay in when there is not.

No magnitudes, no right ascension, no star chart covered in symbols. If you want those, there are excellent apps for it, and this is not one of them.

One person, in the evenings. What is written above will arrive in that order, and no faster than the sky asks for.

If something is missing, the address is at the foot of this page. The first readers' ideas weigh a great deal more than mine.