iPhone·Apple TV·Apple Watch
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.
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
- No account and no sign-in.
- No analytics, no tracking, and no third-party advertising or analytics SDKs.
- Heliograph runs no servers of its own — data is fetched directly from public NOAA and NASA endpoints.
- Storm Lock Screen alerts are generated on your device; nothing about you is stored or sent.
- Your location, if you grant it, is used only on-device to draw your aurora viewline — never stored or sent anywhere.
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.