What’s New in PhotoWeather: June 2026

The dashboard has always been the first thing you see when you open PhotoWeather. Until now, it’s been useful for summary stats and upcoming opportunities — but it hasn’t told you what’s happening right now across your locations. This update changes that, and adds two new conditions specifically for night sky shooters.

1. Live Pulse — Your Dashboard Comes Alive

Live Pulse is a new section at the top of the dashboard that scans the current forecast across all your active locations and surfaces any photographic conditions that are meaningfully active. No rules required — it works independently of your alert rules. This means you can keep your rules focused on your primary location and still have the pulse watching everything else, so you always know if something interesting is building at your secondary spots.

Each location row shows up to three conditions with live scores and timing:

• “now” — the condition is active in the current forecast hour
• “soon” — the condition crosses its threshold within the next two hours

An example of what you’ll see:

Live Pulse                              Forecast updated 4 min ago

Forest Lake     🌫️ Fog Probability 86% · 🌉 Blue Hour Quality 72% soon 18:00
Tromsø Ridge    🌌 Aurora Quality 78% soon 22:00
West Pier       🌤️ Light Breakthrough Potential 69% · 📸 Soft Light Index 66%

Click any row to jump straight to that location’s weather page with the relevant fields already pulled up in the chart. The board only shows locations with actual signals — if nothing’s happening, the row doesn’t appear. It’s designed to be glanced at, not studied.

Live Pulse is live on web now, and rolling out to the mobile app within a few days.

Which Conditions Appear

The board draws from a curated set of 17 derived conditions, each with a configured threshold so the most photographically interesting signals surface first. Free users see five core conditions — fog, golden hour, blue hour, aurora, and frost. Pro users see all 17, including fiery red sky, golden clouds, coastal drama, soft light, and the new astro conditions below. The system evaluates up to three forecast hours per location (current + next two) and returns only the conditions that clear their threshold.

2. Two New Astro Conditions

Two new derived conditions have been added to the field registry, both Pro-tier. They evaluate night sky shooting quality using the same multi-input approach as the other derived conditions, but with astronomy-specific modelling.

Dark Sky Quality

Dark Sky Quality scores how good the night sky will be for astrophotography in a given forecast hour. It takes into account:

• Solar elevation — is the sun far enough below the horizon for actual darkness?
• Moon interference — both altitude and illumination phase, with a curve that penalises a bright moon high in the sky more aggressively than a crescent near the horizon
• Atmospheric transparency — cloud cover across all three layers (low, mid, high), visibility, relative humidity, and aerosol optical depth
• Ensemble confidence — when weather models agree on clear conditions, the score gets a boost; when they’re uncertain, it backs off

The result is a single score that answers “how dark and clear will the sky actually be?” rather than just “is it night and is the cloud cover low?”

Milky Way Possibility

Milky Way Possibility builds on the same astronomy and transparency model but adds a Galactic Center-specific layer. The key difference is the horizon murk penalty.

When the Milky Way core is high overhead (50–60° altitude), moderate haze or humidity has limited impact — you’re looking through relatively little atmosphere. But when the core is low on the horizon (below 10–15° altitude), you’re looking through a much thicker atmospheric cross-section, and haze, humidity, and aerosols matter dramatically more.

The formula models this with an altitude-dependent penalty curve: at 0° altitude, haze and humidity penalties are at full strength; by 12° they’ve dropped to nothing. A clear night with the core at 6° altitude through hazy air will score meaningfully lower than the same atmospheric conditions with the core at 60° — which is exactly how it works in practice when you’re out shooting.

Both conditions appear in Live Pulse for Pro users and are available in the template browser for building custom rules.

3. Soft Light — Hard Radiation Floor

A follow-up to last month’s soft light accuracy work. The formula now uses a hard cutoff at 100 W/m² of total radiation — below that, the score is zero. If there isn’t enough light reaching the scene, it doesn’t matter how soft it is.

Live Pulse changes something you see every time you open PhotoWeather. The astro conditions fill a gap for night sky shooters who’ve been relying on generic cloud and moon data. And the soft light fix keeps the alert quality creeping upward month over month.

Questions or feedback? Reach out at support@photoweather.app.

Clear skies, Pontus