AuroracastUKThanks
Credits and thanks
Auroracast is free and always has been. It exists because people gave it their time, their photographs, their expertise and their patience. This page says who.
The people who tested it
Before Auroracast was public, a closed group used it on real nights and reported back what was broken. Between them they found a menu that could not be tapped, a white screen on opening, people being logged out, the location button doing nothing, photos that would not upload and alerts that never arrived. Every one of those is fixed because somebody here took the trouble to say so.
- Jeni
With thanks to Glenn Wheatley
The way this site reads space weather follows guidance from Glenn Wheatley, an experienced aurora observer: using Hp30 rather than the Kp index, watching the solar wind and the IMF above all else, and choosing magnetometers far enough north to see a substorm building rather than arriving.
Photography by Jonny Gios
The aurora and night sky photographs on this site were taken by Jonny Gios Photography, a Lake District photographer, and are used with his permission. He also wrote the iPhone walkthrough in the guide, from his own phone.
Where the measurements come from
Nothing on this site is measured by us. The space weather readings come from NOAA and its Space Weather Prediction Center, from NASA, and from GFZ Potsdam. The ground magnetometer readings come from INTERMAGNET and the national institutes that run the observatories, who publish them freely for anyone to use. The weather comes from Open-Meteo and place search from OpenStreetMap. Every one of them is named in full at the foot of this page.
And everyone who posts a sighting
The sightings page is the one part of Auroracast no instrument can provide. Somebody standing outside saying what they can actually see, right now, is worth more to the person deciding whether to get their coat than any forecast on the site.