About this site
Why Aurora Tonight exists
A location-specific aurora forecast tool, built because the existing ones weren't good enough.
Sean Barraclough
Web developer, Dorset, UK
I've had an interest in space for a long time - the kind that starts with a telescope at age twelve and never quite goes away. During the current solar maximum, aurora sightings started showing up everywhere: social media, news sites, group chats. People who had never paid attention to space weather were suddenly looking north from their gardens.
I wanted to know whether it was worth going out on a given night from where I live. The tools I found were either too technical for casual use, too US-focused, or just outdated. So I built one.
What the site does
Aurora Tonight pulls data from three authoritative sources - NASA's DONKI database for solar event data, NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center for live solar wind readings, and Open-Meteo for location-specific cloud cover forecasts. The forecast updates every 30 minutes and calculates visibility by latitude, so you can see whether conditions are relevant for your location rather than getting a generic global outlook.
I'm a developer, not a space weather scientist. What that means in practice: I can build good tools and I care a lot about getting the data right, but I'm not generating original forecasts. Everything on this site traces back to publicly published scientific data. The data sources page explains exactly where the numbers come from and who produces them.
The site is for anyone trying to decide whether tonight is worth the effort - trip planners who have one clear night on their itinerary, photographers working out whether to set the alarm, or someone who just saw something on the horizon and wants to know if it was real.
Other projects
Aurora Tonight came out of the same impulse that led me to build closeapproach.space - a tracker for near-Earth asteroid close approaches. Both sites are attempts to take complex scientific data and make it readable for people who are curious but not specialists.
Space is interesting. Most of the data that describes what is happening in it is publicly available. The gap is usually just presentation.
On actually seeing the northern lights
I haven't been to Iceland or Norway yet. Both are on the list - building this site has made that more likely, not less. There is something strange about spending months thinking carefully about dark sky conditions, cloud cover windows, and seasonal viewing patterns for places you haven't been to.
In the meantime, Dorset is not a bad place to watch from during a strong storm. The south coast has genuine dark sky if you know where to go, and a Kp 7 event reaches here.
Get in touch
The best place to find me is Reddit (u/SeanBarraclough). If you have found a bug, a data issue, or a location that should be added, that is where to flag it.
Full author profile: Sean Barraclough.
