Our mission

Why AuroraSee exists

Most aurora-tracking tools are built for the northern hemisphere and treat Australia and New Zealand as an afterthought, if they cover the region at all. AuroraSee exists to fix that. We built it to make it easier for locals and tourists to track the aurora australis, the Southern Lights, across Australia, from Tasmania’s reliably dark skies to the extreme-storm-only coastlines further north, and across New Zealand’s South Island.

Whether you’re planning a dedicated aurora-chasing trip to Hobart or just want to know if it’s worth stepping outside in Melbourne tonight, the goal is the same: one honest, location-specific answer, not a vague global map that reads “low” no matter what.

The data behind the verdict

Every verdict on AuroraSee is built from live space-weather data, not a static seasonal average. We parse real-time feeds from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (solar wind speed, density, and the interplanetary magnetic field’s Bz component), NASA’s DONKI database, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s Space Weather Services.

Most northern-hemisphere apps rely solely on the global Kp index, a 0-9 scale that consistently under-predicts visibility across the southern hemisphere. AuroraSee also tracks the Kaus index, a BOM-specific scale tuned for southern-hemisphere conditions, alongside sustained southward Bz and local cloud cover pulled from Open-Meteo. That combination is parsed and re-scored every five minutes, so the verdict on screen reflects current conditions, not a forecast from hours ago.

The result gets translated out of raw nanotesla readings and probability percentages into one plain-language call: go now, get ready, or not tonight, for whichever of our five tracked regions you care about.