Astro-Smart weather and SQM

[Bfialkov]

Hi


Has anyone had any experience with Astro-Smart Weather stations and the SQM?


Good, Different, Otherwise?


The price seems pretty good - unless i'm missing something?

[jamespierce]

An SQM isn't a weather station.

The darkest or 'best' SQM readings at my observatory occur during very severe storms. Yes with experience you can deduce some high light cloud with the SQM readings but I would not trust it to look after my gear.

There are a bunch of good true cloud sensing weather stations out there but none of them are very cheap I'm afraid. What's the setup you are looking to monitor or protect?

eg. Is this for your own curiosity or are you looking to make it part of a remote/automatic astro imaging setup?

[Bfialkov]

Thanks for the response James. The specific model I’m looking at is SMP-R2-RF
1 x $349.00
5 sensor package(SQM, IR cloud, Rain/Snow, LUX, Barometer), RF dongle for PC.

It’s more of a curiosity as I unfortunately don’t have space for an observatory.
I’d like it to serve two purposes. Obviously what’s the sky like and is there high cloud overhead. And what’s the general weather Trending like for my other hobbies

Your thoughts?

Cheers

Barry

[jamespierce]

That is more interesting I had only clicked on the SQM model.

IR cloud is what you need, I guess the question is how reliable it is?

That's ~1/3 the price of pretty much anything else. These are used by places like SRO so should be decent - https://interactiveastronomy.com/skyalertindex.html

All of them suffer the same issue which is that IR sensors invariably degrade over time and get less sensitive, so they have to be replaced some what regularly.