Badlands National Park
Other places
What this is
A dark-sky planning resource for the Badlands, the Black Hills and Devils Tower.
Most stargazing tools report the moon by phase, which is close to meaningless on its own. A 60% moon that sets at 11:30pm leaves a pristine sky from midnight. A 35% moon that stays up all night ruins the session. This forecast samples the astronomically dark window and weights the moon by how high it actually sits, minute by minute.
Cloud is split by altitude for the same reason. Thin high cirrus is nearly invisible to the eye and ruins astrophotography, so a night reported as 20% cloud that is 20% cirrus is a bad night.
Every score carries the reason behind it, including how high the Milky Way core gets and how long it stays useful. Meteor showers are not in the score yet.
Aurora is deliberately not in it either. Geomagnetic storms are forecastable a day or three ahead and no further, so a column for it across fourteen nights would be eleven nights of invention. It gets a page of its own on its own timescale, from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center.