Aurora Bot Mark 2

The Aurorabot mark 2 is the continuation of an old project I once made on a rainy day

The target of this project is to give me (Hendrik Peter) a nice way to alert myself and others of Northern lights through a handy API and Text messages.

This project is open source! Check out the code in the Gitlab repo!

Want to receive SMS alerts?

Send me a message at peter[.at.]hendrikpeter.net and I'll add you!
Text messages are sent when multiple stations report high auroral activity in the EU-Nordic region. Text messages are sent between 6pm and 01am UTC only and rate-limited to 1 message per 50 minutes.
If auroral activity suddenly increases within these 50 minutes then a second message is dispatched ahead of the 50 minute mark for obvious reasons.

API endpoints

There are different paths in this "API" that are totally free to use, note that the JSON and TXT files are created at intervals and cached for 1 minute to lower the pressure to third party API's used in this project

When using these APIs please either send a few requests per minute or cache your requests on your side too. This entire project is running on a cheap machine

Want to use my code, chat me up or perhaps go for a cup of coffee? Just contact me, the details are on Gitlab

I'd like to thank the Tromsø Geophysical Observatory and the Finnish Meteorological Institute for their fantastic magnetogram-endpoints!

Aurora data as JSON

Live data

api/aurora_data.json

This data can be used to see the current Kp measured from sampling the last 5 minutes of metrics from phys.uit and calculating kp from them

The more southern points should have a valid and stable KP measurement. I (the developer) am however still working on the fine-tuning of the kp measurements from the more northern stations.

Aurora data as TXT

highest Kp

api/highest_kp.txt

This end-point prints a short name and the calculated kp value of the location measuring the highest kp the simple TXT structure makes it easy to print Kp as a neat data-point in all kinds of places where you're allowed to print text content, like my Aurora plugin for Tmux.

Highest 3 Kp locations

api/highest_3_kps.txt

This plugin does pretty much the exact same thing as the previous Highest Kp, but instead of one segment it shows 3 locations with the highest Kp.

Other services using these APIs

AuroraBot Map

This is a simple plugin I made myself. it downloads the data from this site at intervals and parses it into a plotly.js Map graph.
The entire web-app has a dark theme to make sure you don't end up blinding yourself watching the site while scanning they sky for actual auroras.
It's possible to add the website to your Iphone or Android homescreen using the built in "add to homescreen" functionality of Safari on IOS, and Chrome on Android.

Live: aurora-map.hendrikpeter.net
Source: git.hendrikpeter.net/hendrikpeter/aurora-bot-map