Lightning Tracker & Radar Map vs Heliograph

Lightning Tracker & Radar Map helps you understand storm activity before it reaches you. See live lightning, storm zones, alerts, saved places and forecast context in one focused weather safety app. Powered by NOAA GOES GLM and EUMETSAT MTG-I1 LI satellite data, Lightning Tracker shows recent lightning flashes on a fast map, clusters active strikes into storm zones, and helps you judge whether a storm is building, approaching or moving away. Coverage includes the Americas, Atlantic, Europe and Africa; features depend on supported coverage and data availability. USE IT BEFORE YOU GO OUT Check storms before golf, boating, hiking, school sports, outdoor work, road trips, camping, events and family time outside. Open the map, check the nearest activity, review the storm zone and decide whether to wait, move or seek shelter. LIVE LIGHTNING MAP Fresh strikes appear on the map with age and distance context. Zoom from a regional view down to the places that matter and keep watching as cells develop. STORM ZONES AND TRACKS Lightning clusters are grouped into storm zones so the map is easier to read. Track movement, intensity and projected paths instead of trying to interpret scattered strikes one by one. HISTORY AND FORECAST Premium unlocks 24-hour lightning history, a lightning heatmap and storm forecast context from NOAA SPC where available. ALERTS FOR SAVED PLACES Set an alert radius around the places you care about. Free users can monitor one saved place with basic storm data; Premium adds push alerts, wider radius, more saved places, advanced storm data and an ad-free experience. 30-30 SAFETY TIMER Use the built-in timer to follow the 30-minute lightning safety rule after nearby activity. It gives you a simple outdoor-safety checkpoint when the sky is changing fast. Lightning Tracker is built for one practical question: how close is the storm, where is it moving and is it time to get inside? Terms: https://lightningtracker.app/terms Privacy: https://lightningtracker.app/privacy

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. Ambient Mode includes solar imagery, hourly Moon visualization, latest published Earth photography, dated cloud and thermal-detection maps, Aurora Globe and Solar Wind. Image dates and source details are available in the app. These views are not live video or emergency warnings.