Terms of use

Draft of August 2026 · The Quiet Sky

These terms cover your use of The Quiet Sky, operated by QuietSky, based in the United Kingdom; a postal address is available on request at contact@quietsky.co.uk. Using the app means accepting them.

What the app is, and what it is not

The Quiet Sky combines public weather models with astronomical calculation to estimate how good a night will be for imaging. Every number it shows is a forecast or a derived estimate. Forecasts are wrong regularly, and the further ahead they look the more often they are wrong.

Nothing here is a safety service. Do not use it to decide whether it is safe to be out, to drive, to leave equipment unattended, or to be on a hill in the dark. It is not a meteorological warning system and carries no severe-weather alerting of any kind. For that, use your national weather service.

Cloud, seeing and transparency figures are model output, not observation. Sky-brightness figures come from a survey atlas that may be years old and cannot know about the new floodlight next door. Target visibility is computed geometrically and ignores your actual horizon, trees and buildings.

Your account

• You need a working email address, because it is the only way to recover the account.
• Keep your password to yourself. Activity through your account is treated as yours.
• One person per account. Sharing logins means sharing the location data described in the privacy notice, which is rarely what people intend.
• You can delete your account at any time from within the app. Deletion also destroys your sites, rigs and logged sessions, immediately and permanently.

Fair use of the API

Much of what this app serves is fetched, at cost or under someone else's goodwill, from Open-Meteo, Environment and Climate Change Canada, 7Timer!, the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg, Wikipedia and a map tile CDN. Draining those through this app puts the app's own access at risk.

So: no scraping, no automated bulk querying, no reselling or redistributing the forecast data, no using this as a backend for another product, and no circumventing the rate limits. Endpoints are throttled and cross-site browser requests are refused; treat those limits as the boundary rather than an obstacle. Access may be suspended where use threatens those upstream services.

The upstream data itself remains subject to the licences of the organisations that publish it. Those licences are set out on the sources and licences page, and several of them are share-alike or attribution licences that follow the data wherever it goes, including into anything you do with what you see here.

What you contribute

Sites, rigs, session notes: yours. You keep them, and no ownership in them is claimed beyond the permission to store and process them so the app can work. Do not upload anything unlawful, anyone else's personal data, or anything you do not have the right to store.

Free, trial and paid tiers

New accounts currently receive a limited trial of the premium forecast layers. The trial begins when you confirm your email address, not when you register, and it is granted once per account; confirming a different address later does not start a second one. Trials and free tiers may change or end at any time.

Paid subscriptions

Where a paid tier is offered, the price and billing cycle are the ones shown at checkout, and payment is handled by Stripe; this app never sees or stores your card details. A subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period until cancelled.

You can cancel at any time from the billing portal linked in your account. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period already paid for: you keep the premium layers until then, and no further payment is taken. Within 14 days of your first payment you may instead cancel for a full refund of that payment, whether or not you used the service in the meantime. Outside that window, and for renewals, payments are not refunded pro rata, though a refund may be given at our discretion where something on our side went materially wrong. If a renewal payment fails, the premium layers remain available for a grace period while Stripe retries, and the account then returns to the free tier; nothing is deleted. None of this affects your statutory rights.

Availability

There is no uptime commitment. The app depends on third-party services that go down without notice, and it may itself be taken offline for maintenance or withdrawn entirely. Reasonable notice will be given before permanent withdrawal so you can retrieve your session ledger.

Liability

The app is provided as-is and as-available, without warranties of accuracy, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted operation, to the fullest extent the law allows.

Liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded, is not excluded. Beyond that, the operator's total liability to you under these terms is limited to the amount you paid for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose, and nothing is owed for a night lost to a forecast that was wrong.

Ending things

You may stop using the app and delete your account whenever you like. Access may be suspended or ended where these terms are broken, where use endangers the upstream services, or where required by law.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes fall to the courts of England and Wales. This does not remove any consumer protection you have where you live.

Changes

These terms may change. Material changes will be announced in the app before they take effect; continuing to use it afterwards is acceptance.