Nightwatch is a silent macOS menu-bar utility that tells astrophotographers when tonight will be clear enough for a long imaging session and which targets to shoot. It scores the sky, finds contiguous clear windows with hourly breakdowns, shows darkness, Moon phase/position, seeing, wind, dew risk and transparency, and selects the three best targets for your equipment. It offers an hour‑before‑sunset alert if tonight looks good, a Tonight's Plan with telescope filter, exposure and frame counts plus an altitude chart, a ten‑night Week Ahead with “Less certain” markings for forecasts beyond three days, and a Targets window that can show tomorrow night. Additional features include a full set of constellation drawings, nearby dark‑site scoring and maps, horizon profiles derived from terrain data, event listings (meteors, eclipses, comets, ISS) with Add to Calendar, and small/medium/large desktop widgets that mirror the popover.
Nightwatch refreshes forecasts every 30 minutes and computes astronomy locally with Astronomy Engine. Forecast sources are Apple Weather (WeatherKit) when signed, Open‑Meteo otherwise, and 7Timer for seeing/transparency; ancillary downloads include sky‑survey thumbnails, Moon images, comet/ISS elements and aurora forecasts. Releases are signed and notarised DMGs with SHA‑256 checksums; build instructions target macOS 14+ and Xcode 26, with scripts for project generation, tests and ad hoc signing. Privacy documentation lists which external services receive which data, and the codebase includes build, widget and release automation.
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