Fresh from the Sun
- Loading the latest solar activity…
Full report: CME activity today →
S slow
C common
O fast
R rare
ER extreme
· speeds at launch — the same colors the live map uses
Every coronal mass ejection NASA catalogs, drawn from the Sun to Earth with its measured speed and aim, updated every few minutes. Ten spacecraft feeds in one picture you can read at a glance: the most comprehensive and understandable view of space weather anywhere.
Full report: CME activity today →
Fresh NASA & NOAA data every few minutes. Each CME is drawn with its measured direction, width, and speed — so you can see at a glance whether it's aimed at Earth or sailing past.
The map is a time machine: run the clock forward to preview arrivals, or rewind and replay history — the 2024 Gannon superstorm, the 1859 Carrington Event, and more, with the real data behind them.
A free six-module course that runs on this map: click today's newest CME, replay the 2024 superstorm and call its arrival, move the solar wind and watch the forecast move. About 40 minutes, no account. Start the course →
Free two-stage aurora alerts: a heads-up days ahead when a significant Earth-directed CME launches, and a "go outside now" confirmation ~30–60 minutes before the storm hits. Sign up below →
The question everyone actually has, answered in one glance: NOAA's real-time aurora oval, how far south it reaches right now, city-by-city visibility, the 3-night Kp forecast, and whether the Moon will wash it out.
The full outlook, city by city: Aurora tonight →
The same physics that paints the aurora also opens and closes the HF bands. The radio conditions page rates 80–10 m day and night from the live solar indices, shows flare-blackout status, and — the part no band-conditions banner does — warns you days before an inbound CME degrades your weekend.
Band-by-band, right now: HF conditions →
Subscribers get the two-stage warning: the days-ahead heads-up, and the measured go-now confirmation from the L1 monitor. No spam, unsubscribe in one click. (Privacy: we store your address and nothing else.)
Every famous storm below is more than a story — it's a scrubbable replay (try it in the 3D view). Watch the actual CMEs leave the Sun and sweep out to Earth.
A barrage of CMEs drove the first G5 storm in 20 years — aurora to the tropics, and the most-photographed in history.
Read & replay →The most intense storm on record. Telegraphs sparked, aurora reached the equator — and it crossed from Sun to Earth in under a day.
Read & replay →A Carrington-class CME tore across Earth's orbit and missed — hitting a spacecraft that measured the superstorm we were spared.
Read & replay →Every arrival time here is a physics estimate, labelled as one, and scored against what actually happened. Here is the record, misses included.
The full scoreboard, methodology, and misses: the science page · plain-English guide: the manual
Every number here was measured by one of these. NASA, NOAA and ESA share the data within minutes; this site turns it into a picture. The live solar wind now comes from NOAA's new SOLAR-1, on duty at L1 since spring 2026.
What each one measures and which part of the site it feeds: the spacecraft page
The Sun runs on a roughly 11-year cycle, and everything above rides it. Cycle 25 most likely peaked in late 2024 — stronger than forecast — and we're now in the early declining phase: years of storm and aurora chances left, and historically the phase that produces some of the nastiest individual storms.
The full story — 276 years of cycles, NOAA's forecast, the great storms pinned: the solar cycle →
The live map above, the aurora widget, and a compact numbers card are all free to embed — a plain iframe, no scripts, no keys, live data included. Pick a widget, tune it, and copy the snippet. There's an open JSON API too, if you'd rather render it yourself.
For researchers & developers: open JSON API · methodology & validation · data sources (NASA DONKI & SDO, NOAA SWPC, CDAWeb OMNI, GFZ Potsdam)
Typically one to three days, depending on how fast it left the Sun — slow CMEs amble at ~350 km/s while extreme ones exceed 2,000 km/s. The fastest transit on record is about 17 hours, during the 1859 Carrington Event.
Ours are typically good to about ±12 hours — back-tested against hundreds of real, measured arrivals, with a median error of ~12 hours, comparable to NASA's full supercomputer model. The science page publishes the whole scoreboard, misses included.
It depends on tonight's geomagnetic activity (the Kp index) and how far you are from the pole — plus dark skies and the Moon. The Aurora tonight page gives a live answer for your location, city by city.
A flare is a burst of light and X-rays that reaches Earth in 8 minutes and can black out radio; a CME is a billion-ton cloud of magnetized plasma that arrives one to three days later and causes geomagnetic storms and aurora. Big eruptions often produce both — the tracker shows flares flashing at the Sun and the CMEs they launched.
Extreme ones can: the March 1989 storm collapsed Québec's power grid in 92 seconds, and a Carrington-class storm today would be a genuine infrastructure event. Ordinary storms — the kind that happen monthly — mostly mean aurora, minor satellite drag, and GPS wobble, not blackouts.
Take the six-module course: each module puts the live map on the page with one thing to do, and teachers get three ready lesson plans. Or start with a story: the famous storms pages read like history and each ends with a replay you can scrub — the Carrington Event and the Almost-War Storm are class favorites. Then the plain-English guide explains every number on the live map. Everything here is free, no account, and the estimates are honest about their error bars — which makes it useful for teaching how real forecasting works.
Kp measures global geomagnetic disturbance on a 0–9 scale, updated every three hours; storms start at Kp 5 (NOAA scale G1) and the rare extreme G5 storms reach Kp 9. The guide explains every scale the site uses.
