No made up indices, no unexplained proprietary magic, no numbers that exist only to look impressive. Here is every data source in the app, what it contributes, and how often it updates.
| Source | What it provides | Refresh |
|---|---|---|
| NASA IMAP L1, 1.5M km upsun | Primary real-time solar wind: speed, density, temperature, and the magnetic field components Bx, By, Bt and Bz. | 60 s |
| NOAA DSCOVR L1 real-time solar wind | Backup solar wind and magnetic field feed. Every data point in the app is labelled with which spacecraft it came from. | 60 s |
| NOAA GOES-18 & GOES-19 | Hemispheric power , the auroral energy in gigawatts being deposited into the ionosphere. The two satellites are averaged. | 60 s |
| GeoNet Tilde , Eyrewell (EY2M) Canterbury, New Zealand | One-minute rate of change of the horizontal magnetic field. Local NZ ground truth, and the source of magnetic bay onset detection. | 60 s |
| NASA DONKI | Interplanetary shock and geomagnetic storm events, used for the alert banner. | 60 s |
| OpenWeatherMap | Seven-day hourly cloud cover, moon phase and illumination, moonrise and moonset, sunrise and sunset. | On demand |
| Windy.com | The interactive ECMWF cloud-cover map overlay. | Live |
| NZ camera operators Southloop, Roundshot, TrafficNZ, MetData, Horizons Regional Council, Primo | Seven live camera feeds: Oban, Queenstown, Twizel, Taylors Mistake, Opiki, Rangitikei and New Plymouth. | Live |
| You and everyone else | Community aurora sighting reports. Naked eye, phone, camera, nothing, or clouded out, on the live map and feeding into the Now forecast. | Live |
| Source | What it provides | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| NOAA GOES X-ray sensors | 24 hours of X-ray flux across two energy bands, at five-minute cadence. | The flux chart and A/B/C/M/X flare classification |
| NOAA GOES proton sensors | Proton flux at the ≥10, ≥50 and ≥100 MeV channels. | Proton flux chart and S-scale radiation storm threshold |
| NASA DONKI | The official flare catalogue. Class, begin, peak and end times, source location, active region, and any linked CME. | Flare list, chart annotations, and the jump-to-CME button |
| NOAA solar region reports | The authoritative list of active regions: number, position, area, classification, spot count and magnetic class. | The sunspot tracker |
| NOAA sunspot report | Per-region M-class, X-class and proton flare probabilities. | Sunspot detail panels |
| SDO/HMI via JSOC Stanford NASA SDO as fallback | Live solar disk imagery in three modes at up to 4096 px: colourised magnetogram, magnetogram, intensitygram. | Sunspot tracker imagery and fullscreen zoom |
| NOAA SUVI & CCOR-1 | Extreme-ultraviolet coronal imagery and coronagraph video. | Coronal imagery panel and CME watching |
| Source | What it provides | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| NASA DONKI CME catalogue | Every catalogued CME with its start time, speed, half angle and direction, using the most accurate available analysis for each event. | The 3D CME objects, the CME list, and the impact forecast |
| NASA IMAP / NOAA DSCOVR | The current ambient solar wind speed at L1. | Calibrating the drag model so CME deceleration matches real conditions |
| NOAA GOES-19 SUVI 195Å | The latest extreme-ultraviolet image of the solar disk. | Input to the in-browser coronal hole detection pipeline |
| Drag-based model Vršnak et al. (2013) | The published physics for how a CME decelerates or accelerates toward the ambient wind speed as it crosses the heliosphere. | CME trajectories and arrival time estimates |
| IGRF-13 | The International Geomagnetic Reference Field , the standard model of Earth's magnetic field. | Geomagnetic latitude conversion for the oval and location-aware alerts |
A set of Cloudflare Workers running at the edge handle the forecast scoring, substorm risk, solar wind merging, the NASA proxy, notifications, coronal hole history and announcements. There's no server sitting in a rack somewhere waiting to fall over.
Your browser never calls NOAA or NASA directly. Everything is fetched once, cached at the edge and served from there. That protects their rate limits and means the app keeps working even when an upstream source has an outage.
Every panel carries a last-updated time, and the app flags a source when it goes stale rather than quietly showing you an old number. If something upstream is down, you'll know.
Thanks to NOAA SWPC, NASA, GeoNet and the New Zealand camera operators who make this data publicly available. None of this would exist without open science. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
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.
