About Lumara and the person behind it.
Lumara is a free space dashboard and a native app for iOS and Android. It shows the Sun as NASA's telescopes see it right now, the Moon as it stands tonight, and the space weather between them. One person builds it and keeps it running. This page says who, where every number comes from, and what the site promises about accuracy.
Who makes Lumara?
Patrick Colton, publishing as Beeswax Pat. Ex intelligence analyst, 20+ years, and a U.S. Army veteran. That work was reading raw data, checking it against a second source, and writing down what it meant in plain words. Lumara applies the same habit to the sky. Patrick writes the app, the website, and the daily data run that rewrites the guide pages with each morning's numbers. There is no staff and no content team. His other software is at github.com/beeswaxpat.
Where does the data come from?
Every live figure on the site traces to a public government or agency feed. Nothing is estimated by hand.
| What you see | Source |
|---|---|
| Live Sun images, 11 wavelengths | NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), AIA and HMI instruments, republished about every 15 minutes |
| Coronagraph view | ESA/NASA SOHO, LASCO instrument |
| Solar timelapse video | NASA Scientific Visualization Studio |
| Kp index, now and forecast | NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center |
| Solar flare record | NOAA GOES X-ray sensor, 7-day event list |
| Flares, CMEs, storm notices | NASA DONKI (Space Weather Database Of Notifications, Knowledge, Information) |
| Moon phase, illumination, distance, rise and set | Computed on your device from Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms |
| Eclipse and full moon dates | Standard ephemeris tables, cross-checked against Fred Espenak's catalogs and timeanddate.com |
What is a photograph and what is a render?
The Sun on Lumara is a photograph. Each frame is a real image taken by SDO or SOHO minutes earlier, shown at its native pixels. The Moon on Lumara is a render. Its phase, illumination, distance, and position are computed for your location and the current minute, then drawn onto a NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter texture. It matches what the sky is doing, but it is not a live camera pointed at the Moon. No such public feed exists, and the site does not pretend one does.
How are the pages kept current?
A scheduled job runs once a day, pulls the NOAA and NASA feeds, and rewrites the marked blocks on the guide pages: today's strongest flare, the current Kp and its forecast peak, tonight's moon, the next full moon. Each rewritten block carries the date it was written. A page's "Updated" label and its sitemap date move only when its content actually changed, so a date on this site means something happened, not that a script ran.
Pages about future events are written as predictions and say so. After the event they are rewritten in the past tense with what actually happened, and the prediction is not quietly deleted.
What if a number is wrong?
Send the page and the figure through the support page. Corrections are made on the page itself and dated. The source feeds occasionally publish a bad value or a late one, and when that is the cause the page says so rather than hiding it.
Why no ads, accounts, or tracking?
Because none of them make the Sun clearer. The site and app collect no personal data. Your chosen city stays on your device. The only measurement is an anonymous page-view count, page path and day, kept on our own server. The app is free and stays free.