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!
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. 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.
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::
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!
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 :)
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
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, 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).
> 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: 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 should be treated no differently than joules, watts, newtons, etc.
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.
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!
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. 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.
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::
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.
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!
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 :)
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!
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!
"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.
I'm looking forward to the Home Assistant HACS Integration.
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, 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).
> 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: 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 should be treated no differently than joules, watts, newtons, etc.
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.
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.