In his post about the new AAVSO Target Tool, Arne mentioned he'd quite like to be able to see when targets are visible:
Finally, Ron Kaitchuck came up with a graphical program to show the altitudes of the stars he wanted to observe as a function of time through the night. In this way, he found it easier to choose targets - the one that stayed up all night, or switching as they cross the meridian, or whatever). He wrote that in ~1980, so it oughta be much easier today! A link to such a dynamic chart would be valuable in planning your night.
I've whipped together a little web page that can do that, which is accessible here: http://li1523-6.members.linode.com/input.php
It should be quite easy to tie into the AAVSO Target Tool, either by simply linking to that site above, or to include it into the AAVSO back end. It's possible to directly plot a target's visiblity with a URL, e.g.:
http://li1523-6.members.linode.com/plot.php?date=2017-06-09&obsLatLon=5…
I'm sure that someone will now promptly find some horrendous error in my visiblity calculations!
Regards,
Daniel