ABOUT THE OBSERVATORY

The Space Weather Observatory is a live, three-dimensional window on the connection between the sun and the sky it makes here on Earth: the aurora happening right now, the storms of the past — from the great superstorms of 2024 back to the Carrington event of 1859 — and the sun itself, imaged within the hour.

What makes it different

Everything rendered here is either measured, or labeled as a model — and the renderer itself is treated like a scientific instrument that must pass validation before any change ships. The complete technical account of every instrument, fusion step, physics relation and honest limitation lives on the data & methods page.

• The 2024 storms are measured. The May 2024 (Gannon) G5 superstorm and the October 2024 G4 storm are reconstructed frame-by-frame from satellite measurements: far-ultraviolet imaging from DMSP/SSUSI, particle precipitation from POES and MetOp, and field-aligned currents from AMPERE. Between satellite passes, the auroral boundary breathes along a relation fitted to the measured record — never invented.
• Photographs are instruments here. 486 citizen-science and ISS photographs were star-calibrated into full pointing solutions — each one tells us exactly where a camera stood, where it aimed, and what it saw. They constrain the model and then grade it: rendered brightness is benchmarked camera-by-camera against the real frames, and the renderer's structure statistics are compared against calibrated all-sky research cameras (TREx RGB) at the same minute and place.
• History is simulated, and says so. The 1859 Carrington event and the 2003 Halloween storms are labeled historical simulations: Halloween runs on the actual measured 5-minute geomagnetic record; Carrington is anchored to 33 verified eyewitness sightings with documented hours and to the timed reconstructions in the modern literature. Where the record is uncertain, the app tells you.
• Two ways of seeing. A long-exposure "camera view" calibrated against real photographs, and a naked-eye view built on the physiology of night vision — the ~1 kR dark-adapted visibility floor, color vision arriving only above brightness thresholds, and the eye's blindness to deep red — so the app can show what you would have seen, not just what a camera could capture.
• The live sky and the forecast render NOAA's real-time feeds through the very same pipeline as the validated storms, with alert notifications checked against the sky every 15 minutes.

About me

I'm Jacob Sprankle — a weather and space weather enthusiast. I've spent years watching radar loops, model runs, and — on the good nights — webcams pointed at northern horizons, hoping. This site grew out of one question after the May 2024 superstorm: what did the sky really do that night? Answering it turned out to require satellites, photographs, physics, and a renderer that could be held accountable. I hope it helps you catch a sky you'll never forget. If something here is wrong — or you caught a sky worth sharing — tell me: the 🛟 help button files straight to my desk, and I'm @j_sprankle on X and @jsprankle_wx on Threads. (The tropospheric half of the obsession lives at seasonmap.io — year-round US weather on one map, built the same way: NOAA and ECMWF open data, and a forecast model verified in public.)

Thanks

This observatory stands on the generosity of institutions and people who make their data and work public:

• NASA — SDO solar imagery, the SPDF archives (DMSP/SSUSI, OMNI), GIBS Earth imagery, and the CCMC/DONKI space-weather databases.
• NOAA SWPC — the real-time solar wind, GOES X-ray, Kp, and OVATION feeds that keep the live sky alive.
• JHU/APL and the AMPERE team (PI B. Anderson) — field-aligned current measurements.
• University of Calgary — the AuroraX / TREx and THEMIS all-sky camera networks, whose calibrated frames keep this renderer honest.
• NSO/GONG and the STEREO team — helioseismic far-side monitoring and off-angle solar imaging.
• Kyoto WDC — the geomagnetic indices behind every storm timeline.
• The Finnish Meteorological Institute and the IMAGE magnetometer network (CC BY 4.0), with Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory — the Fennoscandian ground chain that lets the live sky report substorm onsets and growth-phase warnings from measurement rather than inference.
• The photographers. All 486 of them — the aurora chasers whose star-filled frames became measurement instruments, and Chris Wicklund, whose 2024 sightings catalog made the crowd's eyes usable as science.
• The researchers whose published work is wired directly into the model — among them Hayakawa, Blake, Love, Fang, Steele & McEwen, Rees & Luckey, Newell, Robinson, and Gjerloev.
• Open source — three.js, and the open-data movement generally.

Support the observatory

The observatory is free — no accounts, no paywalls — and the forecasts stay honest whether or not anyone chips in. If it helped you catch an aurora and you'd like to keep it running, there's a tip jar: ☕ ko-fi.com/jacobsprankle. Tips go toward the domain, data tooling, and the coffee that follows every storm night.

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