The Lumara log
Short entries, written when something is actually happening: a flare worth looking at, a storm that might put aurora somewhere it does not usually go, an eclipse, a meteor peak, a moon worth stepping outside for. Everything here is checked against NASA and NOAA data before it goes up.
Follow by RSS. There is no email list or account, and nothing here tracks you.
Latest entries
Lumara 2.0 for Android and iPhone: Moon calendar, widgets and alerts
A Moon calendar to 2030, the Moon on any date from 1900 to 2100, widgets on both platforms, alerts that stay off until you turn them on, and Lumara's own 24 hour Sun movie after NASA's stopped moving. Still free, with no ads and no account.
How to watch the 2026 Perseids: the peak nights, hour by hour
The 2026 peak fell on the night of August 12 to 13 with no moon in the way. Where to face, which hours pay off in your part of the world, and what a realistic hourly count looks like, with sky maps.
August 12, 2026: a total eclipse and the best Perseid night of the decade
Two events most years would be lucky to get separately land on the same date. What happened when, where each one was visible, and why a Perseid peak this dark does not come again until 2045. With a postscript on how the day went.
Guides
The reference pages, kept current rather than dated.
- Live NASA Sun image: the Sun right now, and what each of the 12 SDO channels shows, from the surface to the flaring corona.
- Space screensaver: the live Sun and tonight's Moon as a full-screen show, free, nothing to install.
- Solar flare today: whether the Sun is active right now, and what the B, C, M, and X classes mean.
- Northern lights tonight: the Kp index your latitude needs before it is worth driving out.
- Space weather: flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms, explained in order.
- Moon phase tonight: tonight's phase, illumination, and how visible it will be.
- Full moon calendar 2026: all 13 full moons and 12 new moons with UTC times.
- Full moon calendar 2027: the same for next year, verified against published ephemerides.
- Full moon calendar 2028: four supermoons and a New Year's Eve Blue Moon that is also a total lunar eclipse.
- Moon distance today: tonight's distance, the next perigee and apogee, and every one for this year and next.
- Sun distance today: today's Earth-Sun distance and light time, with perihelion and aphelion through 2030.
- Equinox and solstice dates: exact UTC instants 2026 through 2030 and why the date moves.
- Solar Cycle 25 tracker: monthly sunspot numbers against the October 2024 peak, redrawn when NOAA posts a new month.
- Open data: the numbers behind the site as JSON, CC BY 4.0.
- About Lumara: who makes it, where the data comes from, and the correction policy.
- Meteor showers 2026 and 2027: which peaks are worth staying up for and which the moon ruins.
- Total solar eclipse, August 12, 2026: the record of the day over Greenland, Iceland, and northern Spain, with the UTC times.
- Total solar eclipse, August 2, 2027: 6 minutes 23 seconds, the longest on land for over a century.
- ISS live feed: Earth from 400 km up, and how to spot the station from your own street.
Where this comes from
Lumara is a free Moon phase and live Sun app for iPhone and iPad and Android, plus a dashboard on the web. It has no ads and no accounts, and it does not track you. The data is NASA SDO and DONKI and NOAA SWPC, the same feeds forecasters read.