About Aurora Tonight

Radif Partners builds Aurora Tonight on public feeds you can open yourself: the Kp forecast and OVATION grid of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, the hourly sky cover of the National Weather Service, and the position of the Sun and Moon computed for your coordinates. Every town gets its AACGM magnetic latitude and the Kp it needs, and every rule that turns those numbers into a yes, maybe or no is written on the method page.

Why this site exists

Search "northern lights tonight" and the first results give you a planetary Kp index, a map of the whole pole, or a table of probabilities by latitude band, then leave you to work out what it means for your town, often while pushing an app or a paid subscription. This site does better than the first Google result for that search because it answers for one place, the one you type, with a yes, maybe or no and the hours worth going out: it sets the SWPC Kp forecast and OVATION model against the Kp your town's magnetic latitude needs, the hours of full darkness computed for your coordinates, and the hourly cloud forecast of the National Weather Service, and it publishes every rule it applies.

Who publishes it

The site is published by Radif Partners, a company that builds free tools on public data. It is not a tour operator, a camera seller, a weather service or a government agency, and it has no commercial link with any of them. There is no app to install, no alert subscription and no account. Nothing on the site sells your location or your interest in the aurora to anyone.

Radif Partners
49 rue du Ressort
63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
contact@northernlightshere.com

What we use, and what we do not

We use what anyone can check: the public data services of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center for Kp and OVATION, the National Weather Service API and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute for clouds, AACGM-v2 magnetic coordinates for 147 towns, NASA POWER for cloud climate, the Census Bureau Gazetteer for town and ZIP code positions, and astronomical equations tested against JPL ephemeris data. We do not use crowd reports we cannot verify, private "aurora scores" whose formula is secret, or photos presented as tonight's sky. Where a rule is our own choice, such as how much cloud still counts as clear, the method page says so.

How the site is checked

The engine is covered by automated tests: Sun and Moon positions against DE421, the Kp rules against the SWPC statements they come from, the parsers against real payloads of each feed, the verdict against hand-made nights. Data files are rebuilt by scripts from their official downloads. The method page sets out the whole chain and its limits, and the editorial policy explains corrections.

Contact

Corrections, a town you would like added, or a feed that seems wrong: contact@northernlightshere.com, or the contact page. We cannot send alerts or tell you what you saw in a photo, but we read every message about a figure.

Forecast, not a promise: the Kp forecast is issued for three-hour blocks and storms arrive early, late or not at all; clouds move faster than any forecast. The answer is a rule applied to public data, explained on the method page, and it is for guidance only: it does not replace the official SWPC alerts or your own look at the sky.