About Aurora Forecast

Aurora Forecast is a single-page web app that answers one question — "can I see the northern lights from where I am tonight?" — in the fewest possible seconds. It is built and operated by an independent small-team of software engineers and amateur astronomers.

Why we built this

Most aurora apps do too much and answer too little. They show you a heatmap, a Kp graph, a cloud forecast, a moon phase, a notification bell, and a \"subscribe for $4.99\" button. The thing they don't do is tell you whether to drive out of the city tonight.

We started Aurora Forecast because the people we knew were tired of opening four apps and still guessing. The difference here is a single weighted score and a one-word answer (GO / MAYBE / LOW / NO) backed by a transparent five-factor breakdown. No subscription. No push notifications. No login.

What we will not do

• Sell an account, tier, or feature behind a paywall.
• Send push notifications. (Web push apps regularly get uninstalled; we keep no relationship.)
• Drop a tracking pixel beyond what is needed to count anonymous page-views.
• Embed affiliate links inside specific Kp / city / cloud numerical answers.
• Publish a \"definitive\" 14-day forecast — that's snake oil, and NOAA agrees.

Where the data comes from

Every number on this site is sourced from a primary science agency or an open data feed:

• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center — Kp index, OVATION auroral oval model, DSCOVR solar wind.
• Open-Meteo — hourly cloud cover, weather variables (free public API, no key).
• John Walker / Astronomical Algorithms — moon phase, lunar illumination, twilight windows (computed locally).
• Light pollution: pre-processed Bortle scale grid from public domain datasets.

Who we are

A two-person team based in Reykjavík and Berlin. We wrote the code, the methodology, and the editorial copy ourselves. Outside contributions are listed on the methodology page. Reach us at our contact form.

Limitations and the honest list

We do not account for: auroral substorm onset at minute-resolution (NOAA does not publish this), local tropospheric inversions that can clear or fog the sky in 30 minutes, or short-duration CMEs whose impact is still en route to L1. The "MAYBE" label exists precisely because of these. Treat the 27-day outlook as a research window, not a guarantee.