Scope Nights Astronomy Weather

Save your money - don’t buy this broken app. Scope Nights received awards years ago. It was once one of the best astronomy forecast apps. However, a global forecasts update broke it over a year and a half ago and it still hasn’t been fixed. You can still use the app for forecasts but if you save any locations as favorites, you’ll receive annoying pop ups that you need to close - for every location, every time you open the app. Even if you don’t save any favorites, this will still happen for your current location. This makes the app very annoying to use - and unusable with many favorites. The fact that the developer is charging $4.99 for this app without even a word on an update in over a year and a half is honestly messed up. I get that it’s just one guy maintaining it in his free time but this app should be free in its current state. Lack of resources doesn’t excuse poor quality.

I use an app called “Good To Stargaze”, which is free, and for a nominal fee allows one to save 5 sites. That app is very succinct and intuitive in its forecasts and presentation. Scope Nights offers much of the same information, and has a more colorful interface, and it has some basic stability issues. When connecting to the Internet to get weather information, the app can hang. When the connection times out, it sometimes crashes out to the “Finder”. I like that you can look up known dark sky sites and observatories, and add - evidently - dozens of custom sites. However, when the app is new, it seems to store every map position you navigate to, and your current location is stored dozens of times, and you cannot add new sites because the max number has been reached. I manually deleted all of these sites, which took several minutes (needs a delete all interface), and afterward it worked as expected. Not recommended over Good To Stargaze, and it does mostly work, but has the drawbacks mentioned above.

When it was first installed, I got lots of errors about not being able to save location information. Sent a tech support request and got nothing back. The error is now gone but it doesn’t always save my location but I guess my biggest grip is you don’t really get anything that isn’t already free with other apps. It has potential, but hey seriously need to add more features for the price they charge. I guess that is why there is not a trial version.