Spot The Aurora isn't a global app with a New Zealand setting bolted on. It was built here, for our latitudes and our skies, by someone who is out there in the cold with you.
Dean French got obsessed with the aurora in early 2023. Like everyone else chasing on the Coast, he'd check a forecast, see a number that sounded promising, pack the car and drive out to somewhere dark with a clear view south. Then nothing. Or cloud. Or a moon bright enough that whatever was there had been washed out to a faint grey smudge.
The information needed to avoid all of that 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 mattered. Can I see it, from here, tonight, with what I've got?
So the pieces got pulled together. Solar wind from the L1 satellites. Auroral power from the GOES spacecraft. A magnetometer in Canterbury that knows when the electrojet is overhead. Cloud cover. The moon. Where you actually are. Then the hard part, which was turning all of it into one honest sentence anybody can act on.
Then it kept growing, because once the data was in one place it became obvious what else was possible. Watching CMEs cross the solar system in 3D. Finding coronal holes on the live solar disk. Showing the magnetosphere loading and snapping. Things that, as far as anyone has been able to tell us, no other public aurora app does at all.
TNR Protography. The reason the app exists.
Google Analytics, February to September 2026. Directors at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center and people at MetService have had good things to say about the visualisations too, along with working space weather researchers. For something built in a spare room in Greymouth, that's not a bad result.
Dean is a self taught photographer, not a developer. When he started building this he had essentially no coding experience, so he used AI tools to help get it made. That's worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
What matters is where the app came from. The logic is his. Every visualisation in there is his. The way the score is put together, the visibility tiers, the moon gating, the magnetotail scene, the way a CME is drawn crossing the solar system: all of that came out of years of standing in paddocks at 1am working out what a chaser actually needs to know. The AI helped turn those thoughts into actual working things.
Everything in the app comes from being out there. The visibility tiers exist because "will it show on my phone or do I need the big camera" is the question chasers genuinely ask each other. The moon gating exists because of specific wasted nights. Night mode exists because checking your phone at a dark site ruins twenty minutes of dark adaptation. It's a chaser's tool, designed by someone who uses it every clear night.
No ads, no subscriptions, no paywalled features, and no data being sold. There never will be. But the domain, the hosting, the workers and the weather data all cost real money every month, and every person who uses the app adds to that.
Hosting, edge compute, weather data and the domain. Every month, whether five people use it or five thousand.
Keeping it free and ad free for everyone, and paying for the time that goes into new features instead of a paywall.
Exactly the same app as everyone else. Supporters get no special features, because holding features back isn't the point.
Sending it to someone who'd get use out of it helps just as much, and costs nothing.
The fastest way to reach us, and where the community posts what they're seeing on the night.
Spot The AuroraFor bug reports, feature requests, or anything that needs more than a comment.
help@spottheaurora.co.nzEverything that's shipped, when it shipped, and what's being worked on next.
Read the change logA note on what this is. Spot The Aurora is a citizen science and aurora chasing tool built on public data from NOAA, NASA and GeoNet. It is not an official space weather service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of those organisations. For critical infrastructure protection or official warnings, use NOAA SWPC and MetService.
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.
