A living aurora, straight from the Sun

Heliograph is a focused, native space-weather app — current conditions and short-horizon forecasts from NOAA and NASA, shown plainly, with an honest timestamp on every value.

iPhone·Apple TV·Apple Watch

Coming soon to the App Store Free. No account, no subscription, no tracking.

What Heliograph is

Most space-weather tools are either dense dashboards or vague "aurora alert" apps. Heliograph is neither. It reads the real data, turns it into a calm, living picture you can leave on your TV, and tells you in plain language when something is actually happening — and, just as importantly, when it isn't.

What you get

Ambient Mode

A full-screen, data-reactive aurora that means something. One derived intensity drives it all — calm teal when quiet, brightening greens as activity builds, a magenta-violet push in a real storm. Choose a 3D aurora globe, the live Sun, or a flowing solar-wind field.

Aurora australis, first-class

The Southern Hemisphere isn't an afterthought. Aurora australis is rendered alongside borealis — real polar maps with the auroral oval, local darkness, your viewline, and a "where do I go tonight?" ground map.

Storm tracking

A quiet → watch → storm state machine reads solar wind and Kp and shows exactly which triggers fired, with a Sun → L1 → Earth view of the real arrival lead time. It eases to calm rather than invent a storm from stale data.

Impact, in plain language

What a storm actually touches — the power grid, GPS/GNSS accuracy, and HF radio — on a colour-blind-safe day/night map. Deliberately non-alarmist: most days, even minor storms, pass with no noticeable effect, and the app says so.

On your wrist & Lock Screen

An Apple Watch app with complications, plus Lock Screen and StandBy widgets and a Control Center control — current conditions at a glance, wherever you are.

Honest by design

Every value carries an "as of <UTC>" stamp. When a feed lags or drops out, Heliograph shows the degraded state and labels it instead of hiding it — it never pretends to know more than it does.

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 the freshest inputs come from NOAA's spacecraft at the L1 Lagrange point: in-situ solar wind within about 5 minutes, CME imagery within about 30 minutes. That is the physical ceiling, and Heliograph never pretends to beat it.

Typical refreshes while the app is open: solar wind ~60 s, X-ray flares ~60 s, aurora oval ~5 min, NOAA G/S/R scales ~5–10 min, Kp ~15 min, CME imagery ~30 min, solar cycle daily.

Privacy, by design

In App Store terms, Heliograph collects no data. Read the full Privacy Policy.

Data sources

Heliograph displays public-domain data and imagery from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) — the spacecraft at L1, the GOES satellites, and ground stations — plus NASA SDO solar imagery via the Helioviewer Project. Heliograph is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA or NASA.