Every night, the sky above the poles is genuinely alive — charged particles from the sun, a magnetic field opening and closing, light bending into color no one commissioned or designed. This project is an attempt to sit with that: to take real numbers — solar wind, magnetic tilt, geomagnetic disturbance — and let them move something slowly, quietly, without asking anything of you.
There's no dashboard here trying to make you act, no alert demanding attention. Just real conditions, translated into something closer to weather than data — because that's what it actually is.
If it helps you sit still for a minute, or wonder about a sky you've never seen, or just breathe a little slower while it plays — that's the whole point.
A handful of connected pages, each doing a different job:
The aurora begins ninety-three million miles away. The Sun streams a steady wind of charged particles past the Earth, and carried in that wind is the Sun's own magnetic field. When that field happens to point south — opposite to Earth's — the two link up, and the magnetosphere opens like a valve, funnelling particles down the field lines toward the poles.
Forty to sixty miles up they strike the thin upper air and it glows, the same way a neon tube does: oxygen gives the familiar green and, higher and rarer, a deep red; nitrogen edges it violet and pink. The ragged curtains and rays are tracing the shape of Earth's own magnetic field, drawn in light.
How far the glow reaches depends on how hard the Sun is pushing. Forecasters compress all of it into one number — the Kp index, from 0 (quiet) to 9 (severe storm). The higher it climbs, the further the glowing oval slides away from the pole, and the further south you can stand and still look up into it. That single number drives almost everything you see across these pages.
Everything here runs on open, real measurements — no invented numbers.
And it's built with: