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PRIVACY

The Space Weather Observatory (spaceweatherobservatory.com) is a personal, non-commercial-at-heart project for exploring aurora and space weather. This page describes, plainly, what data exists here and what doesn't.

What we don't collect

• No accounts, no sign-ups, no tracking of you by us. The site has no login and no server of its own — it is static files served by GitHub Pages. We do count page views and feature use in aggregate, first-party and cookieless — see “What we count” below.
• Alert subscriptions store the minimum. If you enable push alerts, our alert service stores exactly two things: your browser's push endpoint (an opaque URL issued by your browser vendor — it identifies a device, not a person) and which alert types you chose. No name, no email, no location. Disabling alerts deletes the record immediately.
• Photo comparisons stay in your browser. If you load your own aurora photo into the compare tool, it is processed entirely locally and never uploaded.
• Location mostly stays in your browser. If you grant the optional location permission (to personalize views and visibility context), the coordinates are used client-side — with one disclosed exception: cloud-outlook features send coordinates rounded to ~11 km to api.met.no (MET Norway's open-data weather API — no account, no other identifiers; like any web server, MET logs standard request metadata such as IP address, per its terms of service). Skip the location and cloud features and nothing is sent at all.

What we count (first-party, no identifiers)

To learn which pages and features are useful, the site sends a tiny cookieless ping to our own alert-service worker when a page loads or a feature is used. Each ping carries three strings — event name, page path, and the referring site’s hostname — and nothing else. No IP address, no user-agent, no cookies, no fingerprinting, and no per-person records are stored; the result is an aggregate tally (e.g. “tonight.html: 1,204 views”). Browsers signaling Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control are not counted at all.

What third parties may collect

• GitHub Pages (our host) receives standard web-server logs (IP, user agent) as any website host does — see GitHub's privacy statement.
• Google AdSense may serve ads on some pages. Google and its partners may use cookies or device identifiers to personalize ads and measure performance; in regions requiring consent, a consent prompt is shown. You can control ad personalization at Google Ads Settings and read how Google uses data from partner sites.
• Data feeds and imagery load directly from their public sources — NOAA SWPC, NASA SDO, and an image proxy (wsrv.nl) for photos and solar textures. Your browser requests those files from those services directly.

Feedback you choose to send

If you file a bug report or feature request through the 🛟 help form, whatever you type — plus the context the form shows you it is attaching (the view link, scene, and your browser's user-agent string) — is stored in a private Airtable base belonging to the site's maintainer, and is used only to fix and improve the site. Providing an email there is optional.

Photos you choose to submit

The "📤 share it with the observatory" flow is entirely opt-in and nothing leaves your browser until you press submit on the intake form. When you do submit, we receive: your photograph, its capture time and location (read from the photo's own EXIF in your browser, or from the spot you placed by hand), and any name or email you choose to type. We use exact coordinates and timestamps for one purpose: calibrating the aurora model against reality — the same way the founding corpus of 486 star-calibrated photographs is used.

The public map is a separate consent. Your photo appears on the community map only if you tick that box, and then only with a location coarsened to roughly 10 km and the credit line you chose (or none). Exact coordinates are never published. You can withdraw a photo at any time — use the 🛟 help button or the contact below and it comes off the map and out of the corpus; submission grants the observatory a non-exclusive license for these two uses and nothing else. Photos are stored in the maintainer's private intake base; approved map photos additionally exist as a small thumbnail in the site's public repository.

Changes & contact

If this policy changes, this page changes. Questions or removal requests: use the 🛟 help button on the main site.

The Space Weather Observatory · in memory of Jennifer Gannon · last updated August 1, 2026