After working through burnout after losing my job back in November, I’m at a point where I’m starting to get the itch to build things again.  My latest vibe coded project is a web app called StarGaze Weather that is meant to give you the hourly conditions for your location to let you know if its good weather for stargazing or not.

As anybody that has followed Global Geek News knows, astrophotography is one of my hobbies so I am always wondering if the weather is going to be nice enough for me to spend an evening in my observatory.  I used to use an Android app that would give me all the information I could want regarding the weather conditions for the night but then it went to a subscription model and I avoid subscriptions of any sort if possible, so I decided I’d just write my own app.

So Friday afternoon, armed with an an app idea, Visual Studio Code and a GitHub Copilot subscription, I set out to create the perfect stargaze conditions app that I decided to call StarGaze Weather.  What exactly is it and what does it show you?  I’m glad you asked!

As you can see in the screenshot, it is a web app that can take your location which you can either type in the text box or hit the push pin next to it and be prompted to give the app your location based on your device’s location (if you are lazy like me and don’t want to type your location in) and then with a location selected, it brings up various data related to the weather conditions including an hourly forecast which shows the cloud cover percentage, humidity, wind and more.  It also tells you the different times of night, the moon’s current illumination and an overall summary for if its good to spend the evening out stargazing or not.  And it does it for a 3 day forecast.  Oh, and it even has light/dark mode!

With the features out of the way, lets talk about the technical side of things for a bit.  This web app is a .NET C# Blazor WASM application hosted on GitHub Pages (yay for free hosting!).  I used the Claude Opus 4.5 model to first draft a project requirements document and an instructions file to give the LLM some guardrails and after it came up with those, I turned it loose and less than a half an hour later, the app was done!  I have to say, it really is mind blowing just how good Opus 4.5 is for vibe coding!  It may be expensive in terms of requests but when it one shots an entire project, you don’t really have to worry about it using a ton of premium requests!  As for where the weather data comes from, it is coming from WeatherApi.com.  I will say that I’m not terribly impressed with the weather data its given me for my location but I figure I’ll give it a little time to see if it gets better before I decide to switch it to a different weather data provider.  I’d be curious to know how it does with the weather in your location so let me know in the comments below how it compares to what you are really seeing!

I haven’t looked too closely at the code yet (that is my plan over the next couple of days), so don’t judge it too harshly, but if you want to check out the code, here is the StarGaze Weather repository on GitHub.

If you are an amateur astronomer like myself, let me know if you find this useful and if there are any feature requests you have and I might continue to build more onto the application in the future.

May your skies be clear!