The Forecast page answers whether you should go outside tonight. The Solar Activity page shows what the Sun is doing right now. The CME Visualization page shows what's already on its way. Here's what's in each of them.
The page you'll open ninety percent of the time. It exists to answer one question honestly. Can you see the aurora from where you are, right now, and is it worth going out?
One big percentage, a status word and a single sentence telling you what that actually means for your eyes and your camera. Underneath, four time slots: Now, 15 minutes, 30 minutes and 60 minutes, each written in plain English like "conditions are building" rather than a number you have to interpret.
Below that, the live sightings map, a cloud cover overlay from Windy, and the cameras. Everything you need to make the call, nothing you need to decode.
The live forecast loads here. If it has not appeared, open it in the app.
The live score, right now, from the same feed as the app
Your score over the past 24 to 48 hours with upcoming cloud cover layered on top. Sunset, moonrise and moonset are drawn in as vertical lines, and detected substorms are marked with timestamps. Hover any point for the exact score, Bz, speed and density at that moment.
Reports from other people around the country, pinned where they are. Naked eye, phone camera, DSLR, nothing, or clouded out. Submit your own with one tap. Recent nearby reports feed straight into the Now slot, which is human eyes confirming what the satellites are suggesting.
Oban, Queenstown, Twizel, Taylors Mistake, Opiki, Rangitikei and New Plymouth. Check whether the sky is actually clear somewhere before you commit to driving there, and occasionally catch the aurora on camera before you've left the house.
What the Sun is doing at this moment. This is where tomorrow night's aurora starts, and where you spot it two or three days before anyone posts about it.
24 hours of live flux with the B, C, M and X class thresholds marked. Every detected flare is clickable: begin, peak and end times in NZ time, source location on the disk, active region number, and a direct link to NASA's record.
If that flare launched a CME, one button takes you straight to it in the 3D visualisation. You see the flare, then you watch what it threw at us.
The current sunspot regions mapped onto live solar imagery in three modes: colourised magnetogram, black and white magnetogram, and intensitygram. Swipe to cycle, tap to go fullscreen and zoom right in.
Each region carries its classification, spot count, magnetic class, and NOAA's M class, X class and proton flare probabilities, so you know which one to watch.
The 10, 50 and 100 MeV channels with the event threshold marked. A proton event is both an aurora signal and a radiation storm signal.
The latest extreme ultraviolet image of the corona, plus coronagraph video where you can watch a CME billow off the Sun. Everything taps to fullscreen.
A real time, interactive 3D model of the inner solar system with every catalogued coronal mass ejection travelling through it. As far as we know, nothing else publicly available does this.
CMEs are propagated with a published drag based model, so a fast one ploughing into slower ambient wind genuinely decelerates. The drag is calibrated against the solar wind speed being measured at L1 right now.
Colour tracks current speed. Grey near ambient wind, through yellow at 500 km/s, orange at 800, red orange at 1000, purple at 1800, and pink for the extreme 2500 km/s events.
Play, pause, step or drag through seven days of history plus your chosen forecast window. A marker shows now, and everything to the right of it is forecast.
A seven day chart of the speed and density expected to arrive at Earth, built from the decelerated arrival speeds of everything currently in flight, including the density spike that leads a high speed stream by about 18 hours.
The solar image is analysed in your browser to find coronal holes, which are drawn on the disk with Parker spiral arms projecting their stream out to 1.65 AU, well past Earth.
Rotate, pan and zoom. Toggle the inner planets, labels, the Moon and the L1 point. Switch between top down and side views. Click a CME cloud to read its full details.
Turn on only what you want. The three visibility tiers use your location and the real geometry of the auroral oval. Everything else fires on measured events at the satellites.
| Alert | Goes when | Uses your location |
|---|---|---|
| Naked eye | The oval boundary comes within about 5 degrees geomagnetic latitude of you, tightening to 12 degrees under a bright moon. | Yes |
| Phone camera | The oval reaches phone night mode range for your position. Suppressed above 80 percent moon. | Yes |
| Camera or DSLR | The oval reaches long exposure range for your position. Switched off entirely above 80 percent moon. | Yes |
| Overnight watch | One evening summary between 6 and 9pm NZ time, at the standard you pick. Every night, or only camera, phone or naked eye grade. | NZ timezone |
| Solar flare | A flare is confirmed at M1.0 or above, meaning still above threshold five minutes into its decline, so you don't get false peaks. | No |
| Fast forward shock | Speed, density, temperature and field strength all jump together at L1. The classic CME arrival signature. | No |
| Slow forward shock | Weaker compression, often a stream interaction region or the flank of a CME. | No |
| Fast reverse shock | The trailing edge of a CME or the back of a high speed stream. | No |
| Slow reverse shock | An uncommon trailing rarefaction. | No |
| Announcements | Occasional messages from Dean. Major events, new features, outages. | No |
Built to not annoy you. Visibility alerts only escalate, so once you've had the camera tier you won't get it again that night unless conditions improve to the next tier. Shock alerts have a four hour cooldown, each visibility tier has a two hour cooldown per person, and the overnight summary is capped at one a day.
One detail if you care about privacy. Notification payloads are encrypted end to end to your device. The whole Web Push stack was written from scratch rather than handed to a third party push service, so nobody in the middle, including us, can read the contents of your alerts.
A red shifted display so checking the app at a dark site doesn't destroy the dark adaptation you spent twenty minutes building.
Navigation lives in the URL. Send someone a link straight to a specific CME in the 3D scene and it opens exactly there.
A first visit walkthrough, per page tutorials, an FAQ, and the full technical documentation inside the app. Every formula and every data source, nothing hidden.
Every panel shows when its data last updated and flags it when a source goes stale, so you're never reading an hour old number thinking it's live.
There's a little game in there for cloudy nights. Sometimes the sky is closed and you still want to be doing something space related.
When something genuinely big is happening, a banner goes up in the app. No guessing whether the numbers are real.
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.
