Sky Brightness

[hgrecco]

Is there a way to calculate the "sky brightness"? I am trying to determine if a star / planet will be visible at a given time. In addition to atmospheric conditions, this will depend on the position of the sun and the star/planet in the sky and the phase of the moon. Is there a standard way to estimate this?

[brandon-rhodes]

I'm not aware of what the standard formulae might be, no. My first thought would be to look at the code of a popular planetarium program, like Stellarium, that simulates the stars coming out as the sky gets dark; with their thousands of users, their code for sky brightness probably gets lots of testing against real-world conditions.

[hgrecco]

I found this package https://github.com/ehneilsen/skybright which seems to have all major ingredients, and a paper by Schaefer. I will take a look and report back.