AuroraFox
Every aurora app tells you whether there is a geomagnetic storm. None of them tells you whether you will see anything — from where you are standing, with those clouds, that moon and that city light.
That is the only question that matters when you are standing outside at minus fifteen. It is the one we are answering.
AuroraFox launches in October. Leave your email and be among the first in.
A satellite looking down through the top of the atmosphere sees the aurora perfectly. You, looking up from a road outside Tromsø, are fighting low cloud, a bright moon, the glow of a town behind you, the direction you happen to be facing, and how long your eyes have been in the dark.
Nobody has closed that gap operationally. Every app on the market predicts the aurora. AuroraFox predicts whether you will see it.
Most apps collapse everything into a single score. We keep the two questions apart, because they lead to two different decisions: if the Sun is quiet, stay in and get some sleep. If the Sun is strong and the only thing in the way is a layer of low cloud, it is worth moving — and one number on its own can never tell you which of the two you are looking at.
Other apps fire the alarm on a five-minute spike, and a five-minute spike is not a storm. That is why they cry wolf. We measure the solar wind a million and a half kilometres upstream and give it four hours of weighted memory, so the energy has to genuinely build before we wake you. Fewer alerts — and the ones that arrive mean something.
Cloud layer by layer, because high cirrus barely matters and low stratus ends the night. Moon phase and altitude. Light pollution. Real darkness — not sunset.
One honest number, with an uncertainty range and a plain sentence telling you whether it is worth putting your boots on.
Not screenshots — the app is not finished. These are the three screens we already know will exist, because they are the three moments that matter: the night that is worth it, the alert that wakes you, and the night the sky says no. The visual design will change. What these screens say will not.
AuroraFox
Tromsø
The forecastTwo indices kept apart, and the four things that decide the night.
The alertWritten for where you are standing, not a generic Kp number.
AuroraFox
Fairbanks
The honest noNo other app will tell you this. It is the whole reason we exist.
AuroraFox did not come out of an office. It came out of hundreds of nights outside — plenty of them with the sky shut, the aurora directly overhead, and nothing at all visible from where we were standing. That specific frustration is what this app is trying to fix.
Born in Cali, Colombia; lives in a village of six hundred people on Prince Edward Island. Before the aurora he worked in user-centred design, and holds a master's in scientific imaging. A full-time photographer since 2011, leading expeditions to Iceland since 2022, and currently writing The Book of the Aurora. He does not believe you have to deserve the lights. He believes in Bz, in low cloud, and in going out a lot of nights.
Born in the Dominican Republic, raised in Santiago de Chile. An industrial engineer with a postgraduate certificate in logistics from MIT, she left that world at the end of 2018 to work full time on astrophotography. Everything she knows about auroral physics she taught herself — papers, trial and error, and a great many nights outside. Two of her images have been NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, and her work has been recognised by Milky Way Photographer of the Year and Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Mystical stories about the aurora irritate her: to her it is the relationship between the Sun, the solar wind and the magnetosphere — and understanding it does not make it one bit less extraordinary.
Working. Most of what we know we learned on nights that did not work out.
Solar maximum has passed — all but confirmed to have happened across 2024 and 2025. That does not close the season, and it is worth knowing why. Historically the strongest events of a cycle arrive after the maximum, sometimes years after it: the most powerful flare of the previous cycle was recorded two years late. Nobody can honestly tell you how many good nights are left. What the record does say is that the declining phase has produced, again and again, some of the best.
Sources: joint NASA / NOAA solar maximum announcement, 2024 · Met Office, 2026.