A live aurora forecast for New Zealand that uses where you actually are. It tells you plainly whether tonight is naked eye, phone camera, long exposure or nothing at all. And it checks the moon, so you don't drive two hours to find the whole thing washed out.
This is the real score, live from the same feed as the app. It refreshes every minute.
Google Analytics, February to September 2026. Around 14,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days, and it spikes hard every time the sky does. Not bad for a passion project.
You check a forecast, see a number that sounds promising, pack the car and drive out to somewhere dark with a clear view south. Then there's nothing. Or cloud. Or the moon is up and whatever is there has been washed out to a faint grey smudge.
The information needed to avoid every one of those nights already existed. It was just scattered across a dozen government websites, in units nobody outside the field uses, updating at different rates, none of it referenced to New Zealand, and none of it answering the only question that actually matters.
Can I see it, from here, tonight, with what I've got?
Kp is a planetary average, published three hours after the fact. It says nothing about where you are, what the sky above you is doing, or whether the aurora will be bright enough for your eyes rather than a 20 second exposure.
Chasers have been filling in those gaps by hand for years. This does it for you.
The single most useful question, and almost nothing answers it. The score is tied to real thresholds: nothing, long exposure only, phone night mode, or genuinely visible to the naked eye.
A faint display under a bright moon is a wasted drive. The forecast and the alerts both account for moon illumination. Camera tier alerts switch off entirely above 80 percent moon.
Invercargill and Whangarei do not get the same aurora. Grant location access and the score adjusts for your latitude, and alerts fire based on where the oval sits relative to your horizon.
Not features borrowed off a NOAA page. Built from scratch, running live, and as far as anyone has been able to tell us, not available in any other public aurora tool.
Watch coronal mass ejections leave the Sun and travel toward Earth in a real, interactive 3D heliosphere. Every CME in NASA's catalogue is propagated with published drag physics, so a fast one genuinely slows down as it ploughs into slower wind ahead of it, instead of sliding along in a straight line at a fixed speed.
Coronal holes fire high speed streams at Earth and cause a large share of New Zealand's aurora. Most apps ignore them completely. This one finds them. It pulls the latest image of the Sun and runs a ten step detection pipeline, limb detection through to heliographic projection, entirely on your device with no server doing the work.
The physics that decides whether you see anything is usually left as jargon on a chart. Here it's performed live, driven by the real measurements coming off the satellites.
Directors at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center and people at MetService have had good things to say about the visualisations, along with working space weather researchers and a lot of very particular enthusiasts. It's built for someone standing in a paddock at 1am, but it holds up in front of that lot too.
Spot The Aurora is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA or MetService.
Most tools give you one link in the chain. This gives you all of it, live, in one place. When something happens on the Sun, you can follow it the whole way to your back paddock.
X-ray flux with every flare marked and clickable, sunspot regions mapped onto live solar imagery with their flare probabilities, proton flux, coronal imagery and coronagraph video.
CMEs crossing the 3D heliosphere with real drag physics, coronal hole streams drawn along Parker spirals, and a seven day forecast of what reaches Earth and when.
NASA's IMAP and NOAA's DSCOVR sit 1.5 million km upsun, which buys roughly 45 to 60 minutes of warning. Speed, density, temperature and the all important Bz, updated every minute.
GeoNet's Eyrewell observatory in Canterbury measures the field changing over New Zealand itself. A sharp bay means the electrojet is overhead now. This is why the score can differ from global Kp.
Then the part no satellite can give you. Other people, out there right now, pinning reports to a map. Naked eye, phone, camera, nothing, or clouded out, feeding straight back into the Now slot of the forecast. Plus cloud cover from Windy and seven live cameras from Oban to New Plymouth, so you can look at the sky before you commit to the drive.
Most aurora alerts are one threshold blasted at an entire country, ignoring cloud, moon, and the fact that Invercargill and Auckland are 1,400 km apart. People turn them off inside a week.
These work out where the oval's edge actually sits, convert your position into geomagnetic latitude, and only go when the aurora reaches your horizon, at the tier that applies to you.
One app, two views, one tap between them. Nobody gets talked down to and nobody hits a ceiling.
Simple View. A percentage, a sentence in plain English, and four time slots that say things like "conditions are building". No jargon, no acronyms. Look at the map, see what people are reporting, check the cloud, go outside.
Advanced View. Bz, Bt, By, Bx, speed, density, temperature, hemispheric power, Newell coupling, the Eyrewell trace, the disturbance index, substorm probabilities, clock angle, and 24 hours of history behind every chart.
You've got a handful of nights and no idea what's normal here. It tells you whether tonight is worth staying up for, what the sky looks like at seven camera sites around the country, and whether the moon is going to ruin it.
It's a proper progressive web app, so there's no app store, no download, no account and no waiting for an update to be approved. Open it in your browser and it works. Add it to your home screen and it behaves like a native app, full screen with its own icon and push notifications.
Everything on this site is free and will stay free. There's no premium tier holding back the alerts or the 3D model. It was built by one photographer who got sick of driving three hours on a bad forecast, and it's kept running by the people who use it.
If it's saved you a wasted trip, or got you out the door for one you'd otherwise have slept through, you can shout us a coffee. Completely optional, and nothing in the app changes either way.
Free, no ads, made on the Coast. Open it in your browser, add it to your home screen, turn the alerts on, and stop missing nights you never knew were happening.
