AstroWeather

This is a Custom Integration for Home Assistant 2023.9+. It uses the forecast data from 7Timer! and Met.no to create sensor data for Home Assistant. It uses the 7Timer!-API to pull data from 7Timer! and the Locationforecast-API to pull from MET Norway Weather.

There is currently support for the following entity types within Home Assistant:

• Sensor
• Binary Sensor
• Weather

Forecast data is provided by a combination of 7Timer! and Met.no.

There is also a custom weather card available here as seen in the screenshot above.

Amongst other calculations, the deep sky viewing conditions are calculated out of the combination of cloud coverage, seeing and transparency. For this calculation the cloud coverage is weighted three times and seeing two times in relation to the transparency.

Other Peojects by me:

AstroLive - Monitor your observatory from within Home Assistant.

UpTonight - Calculate the best astro photography targets for the night at a given location.

Table of Content

• How It Works
• Usage
  • HACS installation
  • Manual Installation
  • Configuration
  • Lovelace
• UpTonight (optional)

How It Works

• The AstroWeather integration has a dependency to pyastroweatherio which is in charge to retrieve the forecast data and do the required calculations.
• During setup of the integration you're asked for some location info via a config flow.
• AstroWeather will then create a couple of sensors, binary sensors and a weather component to integrate with Home Assistant.
• For Lovelace you can either build your own configuration or use the AstroWeather Card. The card does provide a config editor for customization.
• All data is updated within a configurable interval in between 1 minute to 4 hours.
• The data has a resolution of 10 km (6.21 miles) and is updated every 4 hours.
• It is possible to use multiple instances of AstroWeather at the same time, even within different timezones.

Usage

HACS installation

This Integration is part of the default HACS store, so go to the HACS page and search for AstroWeather within the integrations.

Manual Installation

To add AstroWeather to your installation, create this folder structure in your /config directory:

custom_components/astroweather.

Then drop the following files into that folder:

__init__.py
binary_sensor.py
config_flow.py
const.py
entity.py
manifest.json
sensor.py
strings.json
weather.py
translation (Directory with all files)

Configuration

To add AstroWeather to your installation, go to the Integration page inside the configuration panel and AstroWeather.

During installation you will have the option to:

• verify the longitude and latitude for the forecast
• set the elevation
• set the timezone
• set the interval for updating forecast data
• set the weightings for cloud coverage, seeing, and transparency for the condition calculation
• (optional) set the path pointing to your /conf/www-directory. Required only for UpTonight (see below)

The interval for updating forecast data and the weightings can also be changed after you add the Integration, by using the Options link on the Integration widget.

Lovelace

There is a custom weather card available here.

It contains some of the sensor values as additional state attributes for use in the custome Lovelace card.

UpTonight (optional)

Ever wanted to know tonights best possible targets? Astroweather in combination with UpTonight is here to help. UpTonight calculates the best astro photography targets for the night at a given location. The default built in target list is a merge of Gary Imm's My Top 100 Astrophotography Targets and the top 200 taken from his incredible Deep Sky Compendium. Additional built-in target lists are the Messier objects and Herschel400.

UpTonight uses AstroPy which cannot be used asynchronously, so it needs to be separated from Home Assisntant.

Please refer to the documentation of UpTonight on how to get it running. Below is the setup I'm using:

I run Home Assistant as a Container. It's config-directory is mapped to /home/markus/smarthome/homeassistant. Ideally run UpTonight via docker-compose.yaml. Example:

version: "3.2"
services:
  homeassistant:
    container_name: homeassistant
    image: homeassistant/home-assistant:2023.10
    depends_on:
      - influxdb
      - mqtt
    volumes:
      - /home/markus/smarthome/homeassistant:/config
      - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro
      - /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone:ro
    ports:
      - 8123:8123
    restart: always
    network_mode: host

  uptonight:
    image: mawinkler/uptonight:latest
    container_name: uptonight
    environment:
      - LONGITUDE=48d7m36.804s
      - LATITUDE=11d34m38.352s
      - ELEVATION=519
      - TIMEZONE=Europe/Berlin
      - PRESSURE=1.022
      - TEMPERATURE=18
      - RELATIVE_HUMIDITY=0.7
    volumes:
      - /home/markus/smarthome/homeassistant/www:/app/out

The UpTonight container is not continuously running. When started it does the calculation, drops the output to the file system, and the exits. This just takes a couple of seconds.

To update the targets on a daily basis I run UpTonight every lunch time via cron:

0 12 * * * /usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /home/markus/docker-compose.yaml up uptonight

For Home Assistant two files are relevant:

• uptonight-report.json - The calculated targets.
• uptonight-plot.png - A plot of the astronomical night.

To embed the list of targets into my Lovelace I use the markdown card:

type: markdown
content: |-
  <h2>
    <ha-icon icon='mdi:creation-outline'></ha-icon>
    UpTonight
  </h2>
  <hr>
  {%- if states("sensor.astroweather_uptonight") | float(0) %}
    {%- for item in state_attr("sensor.astroweather_uptonight", "objects") %}
    <table><tr>
    - {{ item.name }}, {{ item.type }} in {{ item.constellation }}
    {% endfor %}
  {%- endif %}
  </tr></table>

The resulting list is sorted top down according to the fraction of time obeservable during astronomical darkness.

A more advanced variant showing only top 10 targets and including AstroBin search links:

type: markdown
content: |-
  <h2>
    <ha-icon icon='mdi:creation-outline'></ha-icon>
    UpTonight
  </h2>
  <hr>

  {%- for item in state_attr("sensor.astroweather_uptonight", "objects") %}
  <table><tr>
    {%- if loop.index <= 10  %}
      {%- set astrobin = item.name | 
          regex_replace('^.*\((.*)\,.*$', '\\1') |
          regex_replace('\s', '+')  %}
      - <a href="https://astrobin.com/search/?q={{ astrobin }}">{{ item.name }}</a>,
        {{ item.type }} in {{ item.constellation }}
    {% endif %}
  {% endfor %}
  </tr></table>

For the plot, a picture-entity card showing a template image does the trick for me. I'm using browser_mod from @thomasloven for the tap_action to get a zoomed view.

Template Image:

template:
  - trigger:
    - platform: time_pattern
      # This will update every ten minutes
      minutes: /10
  - image:
    - name: UpTonight
      url: http://192.168.1.115:8123/local/uptonight-plot.png

Picture entity:

type: picture-entity
entity: image.uptonight
camera_view: live
show_state: false
show_name: false
tap_action:
  action: fire-dom-event
  browser_mod:
    service: browser_mod.popup
    data:
      title: UpTonight
      size: wide
      content:
        type: picture-entity
        entity: image.uptonight

Result: