Heliograph

Heliograph is a focused, native space-weather app for Solar Cycle 25. It pulls current conditions and short-horizon forecasts directly from public government sources and shows them plainly — with an honest timestamp on every value. What "live" means here Heliograph shows real conditions and short-range forecasts — not millisecond telemetry. While the app is open it refreshes on each source's own cadence, and every reading carries an "as of" timestamp so you always know how fresh it is. The freshest inputs come from NOAA's SOLAR-1 spacecraft at L1: in-situ solar wind within about 5 minutes, CME imagery within about 30 minutes — that is the ceiling, and we never pretend to beat it. Typical refreshes: aurora oval ~5 min, solar wind ~60 s, Kp ~15 min, NOAA G/S/R scales ~5–10 min, X-ray flares ~60 s, solar cycle daily. When solar-wind data is unavailable, the aurora forecast honestly falls back to a Kp-driven nowcast with reduced lead time, and Bz-dependent storm triggers are paused and labelled — we show the degraded state instead of hiding it. Ambient Mode — a living aurora The signature experience: a full-screen, data-reactive ambient that means something. One derived intensity drives everything — calm teal when quiet, brightening greens as activity builds, a magenta-violet push in a real storm. Pick your scene: a 3D aurora globe with the live OVATION oval over Earth's night side (australis first), the live Sun from NASA SDO, or a flowing solar-wind field. On Apple TV it's the lean-back living-room hero; on iPhone you can AirPlay or screen-mirror it to any TV. Built to run for hours with burn-in and thermal care — and it always eases to a calm fallback rather than fake a storm from stale data. Aurora australis, first-class Most aurora apps treat the Southern Hemisphere as an afterthought. Heliograph renders aurora australis first, alongside borealis — a real polar map with the auroral oval, local darkness/terminator, and your own viewline, plus a forecast scrub over the next 90 minutes. A "where do I go tonight?" ground map shows the visibility line across your region and how far toward the pole you'd need to travel. The infrastructure-impact lens Heliograph translates the current storm level into plain-language impact on what storms actually touch: the power grid (geomagnetically induced currents), GPS/GNSS accuracy, and HF radio. A world impact map places those effects on the day/night globe (colour-blind-safe). It is deliberately non-alarmist — most days, even minor storms, pass with no noticeable effect, and the app says so. Storm tracking & alerts A quiet → watch → storm state machine reads solar wind and Kp and shows exactly which triggers fired, with a Sun → L1 → Earth cinematic of the real arrival lead time. On iPhone, while you have Heliograph open, a storm Live Activity surfaces a significant storm on your Lock Screen — no account, no tracking. You can also opt into on-device "aurora likely tonight" alerts. On every surface: Lock Screen and StandBy widgets, a Control Center control, plain-language explainers, a colour legend, and a recent-activity solar time-lapse. Privacy, by design No account. No analytics. No tracking. No third-party SDKs. Data is fetched directly from public NOAA and NASA endpoints — Heliograph runs no servers of its own and stores nothing about you. Your location, if you grant it, is used only on-device to draw your aurora viewline — never stored or sent anywhere. Data sources NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) — SOLAR-1 at L1, the GOES satellites, and ground stations — plus NASA SDO solar imagery via the Helioviewer Project. Heliograph is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA or NASA.