About Sean
Sean Barraclough is a web developer based in Dorset, UK with a long-standing interest in space. He built Aurora Tonight during the current solar maximum, after finding that existing aurora forecast tools were either too technical, too geographically generic, or simply outdated.
The site draws on data from NASA's DONKI database and NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center to produce a location-specific forecast that updates every 30 minutes. His background is in software development rather than space science - his focus is on presenting authoritative scientific data in a form that is genuinely useful to people deciding whether to go out tonight.
Other projects
He also built closeapproach.space, a near-Earth asteroid close approach tracker, from the same interest in making space science accessible. Both sites take complex scientific data and make it readable for people who are curious but not specialists.
In his words
"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."
