Space Weather

Right now

Full current conditions →

What space weather is

The scales

Where the data comes from

• NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center

  NOAA / National Weather Service

  Public domain (US Government work). No licence fee and no redistribution restriction.

  No key requirement and no published rate limit: SWPC serves these products as static JSON files. AsteriaStar polls no faster than each product's own publication cadence and caches every response, so a page view is not a provider request.

  Provider documentation →

• NASA DONKI

  NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Community Coordinated Modeling Center

  Public domain (US Government work), subject to NASA's media usage guidelines.

  The CCMC web service documents no rate limit and requires no key. (The same catalogue is mirrored behind api.nasa.gov, which does require a key and limits it to 1,000 requests an hour; AsteriaStar uses the documented key-less CCMC service instead.) Responses are cached for fifteen minutes, so each event feed costs at most four requests an hour.

  CCMC states that “the real-time space weather information and simulations stored in DONKI should be considered only as prototyping quality and in research context”. DONKI events are shown here as a curated research catalogue, not as an operational alert service — that role belongs to SWPC.

  Provider documentation →

• JPL Solar System Dynamics / CNEOS

  NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology

  Public domain (US Government work), NASA/JPL-Caltech.

  JPL publishes a Fair Use Policy rather than a numeric limit: requests must be “reasonably necessary”, automated processes must not be “unnecessarily frequent, repetitive, or redundant”, only ONE request may be open at a time, and processes must back off on errors. AsteriaStar serialises JPL requests and stops asking after three consecutive failures — within a server instance, which is the honest scope: this deployment is serverless, so a second instance has its own queue and its own failure count. What bounds the rate across instances is the response cache in front of these pages, which is measured in hours: a page view is not a provider request, and the products are re-fetched when a cached page revalidates, not when someone reads it.

  JPL states of Sentry impact probabilities: “The probability computation is complex and depends on a number of assumptions that are difficult to verify. For these reasons the stated probability can easily be inaccurate by a factor of a few, and occasionally by a factor of ten or more.” It also notes there is no guarantee any particular API remains available.

  Provider documentation →

• NASA ISS Trajectory Data

  NASA Johnson Space Center, Flight Operations Directorate (TOPO)

  Public domain (US Government work), NASA/JSC.

  A static file on NASA's public-data store, regenerated every few days. No key, no documented rate limit. AsteriaStar fetches it at most once every six hours, which is far less often than it changes.

  This is the operational trajectory the station's flight controllers use, not a two-line element set: state vectors every four minutes in the mean equator and equinox of J2000, spanning fifteen days. It ENDS. Beyond the published span there is no trajectory, and the station manoeuvres — so a position past the end of the file would be a guess, and none is offered.

  Provider documentation →

• IAU Minor Planet Center

  International Astronomical Union / Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian

  Public data of the IAU Minor Planet Center.

  The MPC publishes machine-readable data files rather than an API, with no registration, no credentials and no documented rate limit. AsteriaStar reads one of them — the NEO Confirmation Page, about six kilobytes — and caches it for ten minutes.

  The NEO Confirmation Page lists CANDIDATES, not discoveries. An entry may turn out to be an already-known object, a main-belt asteroid rather than a near-Earth one, or an artefact; most entries leave the page within days. The score is the MPC's estimate of how likely the object is a NEO, not a probability that it exists.

  Provider documentation →

• NASA Eclipse Web Site

  NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

  Public domain (US Government work), and NASA states that permission to reproduce the data is granted WHEN ACCOMPANIED BY an acknowledgment — “Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak (NASA’s GSFC)” for the solar catalogue and “Eclipse Predictions by Fred Espenak and Jean Meeus (NASA’s GSFC)” for the lunar one. The right acknowledgment travels with every eclipse AsteriaStar shows.

  Static catalogue pages with no key, no registration and no documented rate limit. The two century tables AsteriaStar reads are about two hundred kilobytes together and are cached for a week, because the contents were computed once and do not change.

  Instants are Terrestrial Dynamical Time, and the ΔT needed to convert them to UTC is itself a prediction for future dates — accurate to a second or two for the coming decades, and progressively less so further out. The catalogue gives the circumstances of greatest eclipse; it is not a local-circumstances calculator, and AsteriaStar does not turn it into one.

  Provider documentation →

• Launch Library 2

  The Space Devs

  Free public access as stated by the provider; attribution given on every surface that uses it.

  The provider states the database is free for up to 15 requests an hour without a key. AsteriaStar caches each response for thirty minutes and backs off for a quarter of an hour after three consecutive failures, so a rate-limit response is never answered with more requests. That cache is process-local and does not survive a cold start, so it is a BEST-EFFORT bound rather than a guaranteed two an hour: several serverless instances answering at once each pay their own first request. Keeping inside the provider's allowance therefore rests on the cache plus the CDN in front of it, not on a shared budget — there is no durable one.

  NOT an agency schedule. It is a community-maintained aggregation of announcements made by operators and agencies, and the operators change their own dates constantly. Every entry carries the provider's own confirmation timestamp and its own statement of how precisely the date is known, and both are shown — a launch scheduled to the quarter is not displayed as though it were scheduled to the second.

  Provider documentation →

• MET Norway Weather API

  Norwegian Meteorological Institute (Meteorologisk institutt)

  NLOD 2.0 and CC BY 4.0. Attribution required; commercial use permitted.

  The provider requires an identifying User-Agent for server requests and asks browsers to identify themselves by the Origin header they send automatically, and states that anything over 20 requests a second per application needs a prior agreement. AsteriaStar makes ONE request per reader who explicitly asks for a forecast, from their own browser, and none at all otherwise — so the platform generates no baseline traffic at all.

  A general meteorological forecast. `cloud_area_fraction` is total cloud cover and is NOT astronomical seeing, sky transparency, or sky brightness — those are different quantities produced by different models, and a clear forecast with terrible seeing is an ordinary night. Only cloud cover is read, and it is never renamed.

  Provider documentation →

Every product, its cache window and this server's own request record are on the live provider health page. The same data is available through the public API.

Every value on these pages is fetched from NOAA SWPC or NASA CCMC and carries the provider's own timestamp. Nothing is simulated, interpolated or filled in: when a provider cannot be reached, the panel says so and shows no number. There is no overall “space weather score” here — the agencies publish scales, and a single figure invented on top of them would be an opinion wearing NOAA's authority.