Nice. I worked on a project using SOHO imagery that would do something similar where the images would be displayed on a large screen similar to the observatory on the ship from Sunshine. It was meant for a classroom for an observatory, but it just never made it. Died on the vine. It's cool to see a project with something I have actual experience in how the back end experience is like.
Man something like that would be great in science classrooms or universities. Just showing the current state of the solar system with live data.
I used to have a secondary monitor pulled up to the HD viewing project on ISS years ago where they had live streams of high resolution video feed, slowly cycling between a camera down, forward, reverse. Slowly they started to die, and they never replaced them. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/esrs/hdev/
I still thing it changes one perspective to connect a live feed to space, and just start to take in (even tangentially) some of these live type feeds of the world outside of the manmade confines we find ourselves
I saw that available in app store button, and hoped that it would be available as an AppleTV app. That would pretty much have done what I was attempting. Allow the user to control which filter and then select full screen of that one image. The thing I was working on was going to keep the timelapse loop to one full solar day for a full rotation. Including the moon and the live feed is a nice upgrade. I'd download this in a heart beat if it was available on AppleTV! ::pray-hands:: ::wink::
You may want to optimize the content serving a bit, since it's currently hotlinking multiple large (30MB) videos at 2K resolution from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Yes, you're right about optimization, this what I'll do:
- Switch default to 1024p instead of 2048p so file drops from ~30 MB → ~8 MB (4× smaller)
- Proxy through existing Cloudflare Worker with edge cache
- Add a /video/* route that fetches NASA URL once, caches at the edge
- After 1st request per region, every subsequent visitor gets it from Cloudflare PoP
= NASA bandwidth: ~50 hits/day instead of ~10,000! NASA load drops by ~99%
That's super cool and I love the UI and look of it!
These are only very minor nit-picky things, whilst exploring on desktop mode, that I hope can be helpful.
- When I click on eg. the moon. It it goes to full page, I only found ESC to go out, maybe add a few more options to go back to the dashboard view, such as clicking on top bar title "Lumara", or a top right X that hides away if no mouse movement.
- When I click one of the corona buttons, the image box itself lights up with what I assume is a dynamic colour selection function. This is cool, but I think the boxy outline breaks the immersion slightly, I would just keep it no glow.
- I would also but the buttons to Apple Store and Play Store maybe in the bottom left under the control panel, so that the imagery really shines with minimal distraction. Or maybe leave it to appear only towards the end of scroll (As is already there).
- Lastly the top left Circle is not aligned with the bottom left.
Again these are only suggestions of minor things! I really do think it looks great and good job!
Good eye! That's the Sun's own rotation — ~27 days (Carrington rotation period) at the equator, it's plasma, so slower at the poles. 24hrs ≈ 13° of longitude ≈ ~7% of the disk. 1/365 would be Earth's orbit, which is a different motion :)
Beautiful app! AppStore is working now! The solar imagery and overall UI are really clean; easy to use. It would be nice to see CME tracking added. Also, Stefan Burns would be a great person to share this with - his audience loves space weather content.
Nice. On the moon calendar, it might be helpful to add some kinda marker to indicate the new moon and full moon. Right now the "almost full" days all look the same.
Thank you! It is live on Android, in review on App store and hopefully live shortly. Will remove that hyperlink from the Appstore image until it's live
It should be available in all countries (it just went live a few hours ago, perhaps it takes a day?), I will look into that though and confirm. Hopefully it is available ASAP!
Thank you! You know you are the 2nd person to mention a screensaver, that is enough motivation for me to build it! Seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I will look into it soon.
I did not anticipate having a screensaver project on my bingo card on this day in 2026 but it is now so!
I am guessing that most people would want to see the Sun videos for a screen saver, maybe a random wavelength on each screensaver instance? I will make an opensource repo to it that works on desktop-anything with a little GUI for user settings/preferences.
EDIT: Or did you all mean basically replicating the site as it is but as like a dashboard screensaver? Thank you for all the feedback!
Hmm I will think on this. An open source desktop widget could recreate the screensaver function, triggering on X minutes of inactivity, then minimize upon any user activity. I'll play around and see!
Thanks. I wanted the graphic of the moon that comes along with it, but not sure if that's generated procedurally or through the API? (as you can tell I'm a complete noob when it comes to this stuff). Currently I just use images of each stage of the moon, but it's static so not the most accurate.
Thank you so much. This is one my favorite projects, few bugs, straight forward. I find it refreshing too to sometimes take a step back and observe the Sun and space.
It's on Google play store for android phones under Lumara, hopefully on Appstore within a day or so too! I find the Desktop experience the best though since it includes the ISS live cam feed of the Earth.
A neat dashboard. The usage of metric units can be improved:
> Corona ~1.2M K / Active Regions ~2M K / Hot Flares ~6.3M K / Flare Plasma ~10M K / Active Corona ~2.5M K / 10M K Hottest flare plasma
If "M" means "million", then it's correct but not the best way to express things. If "M" means "mega", then there must be a space after the number and no space before the unit of kelvin - it needs to be written as "1.2 MK" (megakelvins), "2 MK", etc.
> The Cosmos at a Glance / 1.4M km Solar diameter
If "M" means "million", then it's correct but really not the best way to express things. If "M" means "mega", then stacking prefixes is not allowed in metric - it needs to be written as "1.4 million km" (full number word), "1 400 000 km", or "1.4 Gm (gigametres)".
In general publications, any length unit bigger than the kilometre is extremely uncommon. But this aversion to large prefixes is weird because we are (forced to be?) routinely comfortable with megahertz, gigahertz, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, megapascals (material strength), megaohms (insulators), megavolts (the highest voltage transmission lines). I see no good reason to avoid megametres, gigametres, etc. But the unspoken convention is to write "thousand kilometres", "billion kilometres", etc.
> The Cosmos at a Glance / 3,000 km/s Fastest CME speed
This fact is given in kilometres-per-second, but a bunch of other facts are given in kilometres-per-hour. This makes it much harder to compare their relative magnitudes. It's similar to the problem of comparing airplane speeds in knots versus bullet speeds in feet per second. These units aren't wrong individually, but think carefully about when to switch units and when not to.
> The Sun facts / A dynamic sphere of plasma photographed by NASA’s SDO every 12 seconds in 12 wavelengths — from the 5,000 K surface to 10-million-degree flare plasma.
Don't switch units mid-sentence from kelvins to degrees (and which type of degree?). Compare "5 000 K" with "10 000 000 K". It's correct but less common to say "5 kK vs. 10 000 kK" (kilokelvins).
> The Sun facts / The Sun’s core burns at 15 million °C — hot enough to fuse 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second.
I would like to note that 600 million tons (megagrams) is 600 Tg (teragrams). But it's also an unspoken convention to avoid units of mass larger than kilogram, so it's rare to see megagrams, gigagrams, etc. in writing.
> The Sun facts / The Sun’s surface gravity is 28 times stronger than Earth’s. A 150-pound person would weigh 4,200 pounds there.
I would prefer not to see the unit of pounds in the discussion, and also the sentence conflates mass with weight. Reworded with extra notes: A 70-kilogram person (anywhere in the universe) would feel like they weigh 1900 kg on Earth (18.7 kilonewtons).
> The Sun facts / Sunspots are cooler regions — about 3,500°C compared to the 5,500°C surface — but are still incredibly hot.
You mostly used kelvins to talk about the Sun, but now you're using degrees Celsius for a few facts?
Before anyone accuses me of pedantry, please remember: Clarity matters in communication. We have spelling and grammar rules in English, and there are also rules in technical syntax such as expressing quantities using the metric system.
Also, people copy each other, so setting a good example is not just about the current reader, but also future writers and readers. To give an example, almost no one uses the unit "kelvin" correctly, and the bad usages keep getting propagated. Incorrect - "4000-Kelvin light bulb" (adjective form, uppercase), "temperature of 273 degrees kelvin". Correct - "4000-kelvin light bulb" (adjective form, lowercase), "temperature of 273 kelvins" (non-adjective form requires plural). The unit of kelvin must be treated no differently than joules, watts, newtons, etc.
The purpose of standards is to reduce the space of possibilities, which makes it easier for writers to choose what to write and easier for readers to understand the correct intended meaning. As an example, the symbol for metre is just "m", no others. Some ad hoc sloppy abbreviations for metre include: "M" (conflicts with mega), "mtr", "mtrs", "ms" (conflicts with millisecond). For writers and readers alike, it's much easier to learn the single symbol rather than four or more ways of expressing the same unit. Similarly, gram is "g", but I've seen supermarkets with labels like "gm"; kilometre is "km", but I've seen "kms" as an ad hoc plural.
Thank you for the detailed feedback, I did not take it as pedantic. It's important to be accurate and I would hate for this to be shown in a classroom somewhere and have incorrect data! I'll have the site updated today.
That's raw NASA SDO satellite footage. Claude (Opus 4.7) was used almost exclusively for building the site. Static site on Render (no hosting fees), pushed from Github. Uses NASA API's (free), a very cost-friendly project on the ole wallet!
I'll add that "raw" is after a bit of postprocessing to make it pretty.
When the SDO webserver went down a few months ago I rebuilt the L1 data processing pipeline from JSOC so we could still do outreach and there's a surprising amount of opinion that goes into the mapping of data to visualization for each wavelength. My composite movies came out looking more like an acid trip than solar data.
Touché — when the person who rebuilt the pipeline says it's not raw, it's not raw :)
Is optical-flow interpolation a step too far for outreach, or fair game? Tempted to motion-interpolate (ffmpeg's minterpolate) the daily MP4s up to 60fps for Lumara— looks gorgeous but the in-between frames are extrapolated. You're totally right about "raw", I suppose I meant more straight from NASA APIs.
I personally would rather show actual data over interpolated data, but I don't know how many unphysical interpolation artifacts you're getting or whether that really matters at a public outreach level.
That said, if you felt like processing it yourself, the L1 files are available every 12-24 seconds, and preprocessed images are available ~1 per minute. The synoptic version you're using is about 1 frame every 3 minutes at 20 fps so you could just triple the framerate without needing any interpolation, or string together the images yourself.
Nice. I worked on a project using SOHO imagery that would do something similar where the images would be displayed on a large screen similar to the observatory on the ship from Sunshine. It was meant for a classroom for an observatory, but it just never made it. Died on the vine. It's cool to see a project with something I have actual experience in how the back end experience is like.
Man something like that would be great in science classrooms or universities. Just showing the current state of the solar system with live data.
I used to have a secondary monitor pulled up to the HD viewing project on ISS years ago where they had live streams of high resolution video feed, slowly cycling between a camera down, forward, reverse. Slowly they started to die, and they never replaced them. https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/esrs/hdev/
I still thing it changes one perspective to connect a live feed to space, and just start to take in (even tangentially) some of these live type feeds of the world outside of the manmade confines we find ourselves
Just realized you could use a top down view of the earth as a 24 hour clock. I wonder if that exists already.
Sounds like a cool project!
I saw that available in app store button, and hoped that it would be available as an AppleTV app. That would pretty much have done what I was attempting. Allow the user to control which filter and then select full screen of that one image. The thing I was working on was going to keep the timelapse loop to one full solar day for a full rotation. Including the moon and the live feed is a nice upgrade. I'd download this in a heart beat if it was available on AppleTV! ::pray-hands:: ::wink::
Just you wanting it is enough for me to make it!
Honestly considering it now — Flutter doesn't have tvOS support yet, so it'd be a SwiftUI rewrite. But the core ports cleanly. I want to do it now!
What about something similar but for just running it full screen on a secondary monitor?
If you build it, they will come
Looks very neat.
You may want to optimize the content serving a bit, since it's currently hotlinking multiple large (30MB) videos at 2K resolution from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Yes, you're right about optimization, this what I'll do: - Switch default to 1024p instead of 2048p so file drops from ~30 MB → ~8 MB (4× smaller) - Proxy through existing Cloudflare Worker with edge cache - Add a /video/* route that fetches NASA URL once, caches at the edge - After 1st request per region, every subsequent visitor gets it from Cloudflare PoP
= NASA bandwidth: ~50 hits/day instead of ~10,000! NASA load drops by ~99%
This looks suspicisly like LLM answer
Half of it was a to-do list from an LLM response, Claude Opus 4.7, also why it was updated so fast :D
Update: Updated! Optimizations implemented, thanks for the feedback!
That's super cool and I love the UI and look of it!
These are only very minor nit-picky things, whilst exploring on desktop mode, that I hope can be helpful.
- When I click on eg. the moon. It it goes to full page, I only found ESC to go out, maybe add a few more options to go back to the dashboard view, such as clicking on top bar title "Lumara", or a top right X that hides away if no mouse movement.
- When I click one of the corona buttons, the image box itself lights up with what I assume is a dynamic colour selection function. This is cool, but I think the boxy outline breaks the immersion slightly, I would just keep it no glow.
- I would also but the buttons to Apple Store and Play Store maybe in the bottom left under the control panel, so that the imagery really shines with minimal distraction. Or maybe leave it to appear only towards the end of scroll (As is already there).
- Lastly the top left Circle is not aligned with the bottom left.
Again these are only suggestions of minor things! I really do think it looks great and good job!
I appreciate your feedback and will be rolling in some of these suggestions into the next update today! :D
You are very welcome! :)
Looking at the sun daily timelapse. It looks like the rotation of the sun is more that 1/365th of the sun diameter. What am i missing?
Good eye! That's the Sun's own rotation — ~27 days (Carrington rotation period) at the equator, it's plasma, so slower at the poles. 24hrs ≈ 13° of longitude ≈ ~7% of the disk. 1/365 would be Earth's orbit, which is a different motion :)
Beautiful app! AppStore is working now! The solar imagery and overall UI are really clean; easy to use. It would be nice to see CME tracking added. Also, Stefan Burns would be a great person to share this with - his audience loves space weather content.
Thank you for the feedback and I'll look for Stefan Burns!
Update: I reached out to him on X :D
Nice. On the moon calendar, it might be helpful to add some kinda marker to indicate the new moon and full moon. Right now the "almost full" days all look the same.
The Appstore button redirects to https://beeswaxpat.github.io/lumara-legal/
Thank you! It is live on Android, in review on App store and hopefully live shortly. Will remove that hyperlink from the Appstore image until it's live
P.P.S.- Live now on Appstore and Play store!
Would be cool to have a I button with explanation of what each of those are.
I love it but can't understand their differences without leaving the site and comming back for each.
That's a great idea, I will add that today thank you!
Great, we'll definitely take a closer look at this with my son.
Update: iOS just went live minutes ago! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lumara-sun-moon-live-viewer/id...
Site's been updated with the real badge — universal iPhone + iPad app. Free, same features as Android.
Is it available only in the US? Right now it’s not available in Germany. Maybe it (AppStore)takes time?
It should be available in all countries (it just went live a few hours ago, perhaps it takes a day?), I will look into that though and confirm. Hopefully it is available ASAP!
Loosely related is the exoplanets catalog (open source)[1][2].
[1] https://exodata.space/
[2] https://github.com/oiwn/exoplanets-catalog
This is wonderful. I would love to set this as my desktop and screensaver if that were possible.
Thank you! You know you are the 2nd person to mention a screensaver, that is enough motivation for me to build it! Seems like it shouldn't be that hard, I will look into it soon.
I just was going to post same, so make it a 3rd!
I did not anticipate having a screensaver project on my bingo card on this day in 2026 but it is now so!
I am guessing that most people would want to see the Sun videos for a screen saver, maybe a random wavelength on each screensaver instance? I will make an opensource repo to it that works on desktop-anything with a little GUI for user settings/preferences.
EDIT: Or did you all mean basically replicating the site as it is but as like a dashboard screensaver? Thank you for all the feedback!
I meant the whole page with the four sections, but maybe also enable any specific part as well would be cool.
Hmm I will think on this. An open source desktop widget could recreate the screensaver function, triggering on X minutes of inactivity, then minimize upon any user activity. I'll play around and see!
Wow, that's cool
This is beautiful. Sorry about the potentially noob question: is there an API you plug into for the live moon phase?
I'm building an app that could do with this live feed if it's easily available.
If all you need is the phase it is easily calculated; there are several examples in Google
Thanks. I wanted the graphic of the moon that comes along with it, but not sure if that's generated procedurally or through the API? (as you can tell I'm a complete noob when it comes to this stuff). Currently I just use images of each stage of the moon, but it's static so not the most accurate.
This is so sick! as a science nerd, i love this so much!!!
Thank you! I love that you love it! It's on mobile too, check it out!
Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lumara-sun-moon-live-viewer/id... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeswaxpat...
:D
"Live" from the sun, minus the ~500 lightseconds it takes to get here :)
Also the videos are made with frames from every 12 seconds or so over 24 hours, I am definitely using "live" very liberally :D
Looks refreshing. Titles can't capture visual projects like these
Thank you so much. This is one my favorite projects, few bugs, straight forward. I find it refreshing too to sometimes take a step back and observe the Sun and space.
It's on Google play store for android phones under Lumara, hopefully on Appstore within a day or so too! I find the Desktop experience the best though since it includes the ISS live cam feed of the Earth.
+1000 points!
Thanks for the 1000 points!!! :D
I'm looking forward to the Home Assistant HACS Integration.
SDO imagery. Cool.
Awesome! Now I wish screensavers were a thing again.
Me too! I kind of forgot about them for a minute. You see more screensavers on TV now than on the computer!
A neat dashboard. The usage of metric units can be improved:
> Corona ~1.2M K / Active Regions ~2M K / Hot Flares ~6.3M K / Flare Plasma ~10M K / Active Corona ~2.5M K / 10M K Hottest flare plasma
If "M" means "million", then it's correct but not the best way to express things. If "M" means "mega", then there must be a space after the number and no space before the unit of kelvin - it needs to be written as "1.2 MK" (megakelvins), "2 MK", etc.
> The Cosmos at a Glance / 1.4M km Solar diameter
If "M" means "million", then it's correct but really not the best way to express things. If "M" means "mega", then stacking prefixes is not allowed in metric - it needs to be written as "1.4 million km" (full number word), "1 400 000 km", or "1.4 Gm (gigametres)".
In general publications, any length unit bigger than the kilometre is extremely uncommon. But this aversion to large prefixes is weird because we are (forced to be?) routinely comfortable with megahertz, gigahertz, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, megapascals (material strength), megaohms (insulators), megavolts (the highest voltage transmission lines). I see no good reason to avoid megametres, gigametres, etc. But the unspoken convention is to write "thousand kilometres", "billion kilometres", etc.
> The Cosmos at a Glance / 3,000 km/s Fastest CME speed
This fact is given in kilometres-per-second, but a bunch of other facts are given in kilometres-per-hour. This makes it much harder to compare their relative magnitudes. It's similar to the problem of comparing airplane speeds in knots versus bullet speeds in feet per second. These units aren't wrong individually, but think carefully about when to switch units and when not to.
> The Sun facts / A dynamic sphere of plasma photographed by NASA’s SDO every 12 seconds in 12 wavelengths — from the 5,000 K surface to 10-million-degree flare plasma.
Don't switch units mid-sentence from kelvins to degrees (and which type of degree?). Compare "5 000 K" with "10 000 000 K". It's correct but less common to say "5 kK vs. 10 000 kK" (kilokelvins).
> The Sun facts / The Sun’s core burns at 15 million °C — hot enough to fuse 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second.
I would like to note that 600 million tons (megagrams) is 600 Tg (teragrams). But it's also an unspoken convention to avoid units of mass larger than kilogram, so it's rare to see megagrams, gigagrams, etc. in writing.
> The Sun facts / The Sun’s surface gravity is 28 times stronger than Earth’s. A 150-pound person would weigh 4,200 pounds there.
I would prefer not to see the unit of pounds in the discussion, and also the sentence conflates mass with weight. Reworded with extra notes: A 70-kilogram person (anywhere in the universe) would feel like they weigh 1900 kg on Earth (18.7 kilonewtons).
> The Sun facts / Sunspots are cooler regions — about 3,500°C compared to the 5,500°C surface — but are still incredibly hot.
You mostly used kelvins to talk about the Sun, but now you're using degrees Celsius for a few facts?
Before anyone accuses me of pedantry, please remember: Clarity matters in communication. We have spelling and grammar rules in English, and there are also rules in technical syntax such as expressing quantities using the metric system.
Also, people copy each other, so setting a good example is not just about the current reader, but also future writers and readers. To give an example, almost no one uses the unit "kelvin" correctly, and the bad usages keep getting propagated. Incorrect - "4000-Kelvin light bulb" (adjective form, uppercase), "temperature of 273 degrees kelvin". Correct - "4000-kelvin light bulb" (adjective form, lowercase), "temperature of 273 kelvins" (non-adjective form requires plural). The unit of kelvin must be treated no differently than joules, watts, newtons, etc.
The purpose of standards is to reduce the space of possibilities, which makes it easier for writers to choose what to write and easier for readers to understand the correct intended meaning. As an example, the symbol for metre is just "m", no others. Some ad hoc sloppy abbreviations for metre include: "M" (conflicts with mega), "mtr", "mtrs", "ms" (conflicts with millisecond). For writers and readers alike, it's much easier to learn the single symbol rather than four or more ways of expressing the same unit. Similarly, gram is "g", but I've seen supermarkets with labels like "gm"; kilometre is "km", but I've seen "kms" as an ad hoc plural.
Thank you for the detailed feedback, I did not take it as pedantic. It's important to be accurate and I would hate for this to be shown in a classroom somewhere and have incorrect data! I'll have the site updated today.
Just about everything should be updated now, thanks again!
I see the changes now - just incredible! You are probably the most responsive author I have ever interacted with in decades.
Oh wow well thank you! I appreciate feedback and am happy to incorporate it ASAP if I'm by the computer :D
I can see Claude
That's raw NASA SDO satellite footage. Claude (Opus 4.7) was used almost exclusively for building the site. Static site on Render (no hosting fees), pushed from Github. Uses NASA API's (free), a very cost-friendly project on the ole wallet!
I'll add that "raw" is after a bit of postprocessing to make it pretty.
When the SDO webserver went down a few months ago I rebuilt the L1 data processing pipeline from JSOC so we could still do outreach and there's a surprising amount of opinion that goes into the mapping of data to visualization for each wavelength. My composite movies came out looking more like an acid trip than solar data.
Touché — when the person who rebuilt the pipeline says it's not raw, it's not raw :)
Is optical-flow interpolation a step too far for outreach, or fair game? Tempted to motion-interpolate (ffmpeg's minterpolate) the daily MP4s up to 60fps for Lumara— looks gorgeous but the in-between frames are extrapolated. You're totally right about "raw", I suppose I meant more straight from NASA APIs.
I personally would rather show actual data over interpolated data, but I don't know how many unphysical interpolation artifacts you're getting or whether that really matters at a public outreach level.
That said, if you felt like processing it yourself, the L1 files are available every 12-24 seconds, and preprocessed images are available ~1 per minute. The synoptic version you're using is about 1 frame every 3 minutes at 20 fps so you could just triple the framerate without needing any interpolation, or string together the images yourself.