SUBMIT YOUR AURORA PHOTOS

The Observatory's model is only honest if it answers to what people actually saw. Photographs — with a time and a place — are ground truth. Every storm night's submissions become a dataset the simulation is re-run and validated against, exactly the way the May 2024 Gannon storm corpus was built from hundreds of crowdsourced photos.

Saw the aurora tonight, last month, or during a storm years ago? It all counts. One photo per submission; send as many as you like.

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Choose a photo or drag it here JPEG / PNG / WebP / HEIC · 20 MB max · time & GPS are read from the photo automatically when present

When was it taken? (local time where you stood)

Latitude

Longitude

📍 use my current location

Which way were you facing? not sure NNEESE SSWWNW straight up / overhead

Where were you? (town, region)

Anything worth noting? (optional)

Credit name (how you'd like to be credited)

Email (optional — only for takedown/contact)

I took this photo (or hold its rights) and grant the Space Weather Observatory a non-exclusive, worldwide license to display it and use it for research and model calibration on spaceweatherobservatory.com, with credit. I can request removal at any time — use the 🛟 help button or the contact page, no questions asked.

Send it to the Observatory

What happens to it

• It becomes ground truth. Photos are grouped by observing night. When a storm night's dataset is rich enough, the model is re-run against it — your photo either confirms the simulation or catches it being wrong. Both are valuable.
• Privacy: the photo file and the fields above are stored; nothing else is collected. Email is optional and used only if you ask for something. Photo files often carry GPS in their metadata — we read it to place your sighting (that's the point), so only submit photos whose location you're comfortable sharing. See the privacy page.
• Old storms count too. Gannon (May 10–11 2024), the October 2024 storm, or any aurora night — historical photos extend the validation record backwards.

The Space Weather Observatory · in memory of Jennifer Gannon