A personal aurora hunting dashboard built for a weekend trip to Tromsø, Norway. Monitors space weather, cloud cover, and viewing conditions across 8 locations in real time — deployed as a single HTML file on AWS S3 + CloudFront.
Live demo: https://d395xbnp6czf8a.cloudfront.net/index.html
In March 2026 I travelled to Tromsø, Norway for a long weekend to chase the northern lights. Tromsø sits at 69°N — well inside the auroral oval — and March is one of the best months to go: long dark nights, the solar cycle near its 11-year peak, and the equinox effect that amplifies geomagnetic activity.
Before the trip I wanted something better than the generic aurora apps. I wanted a dashboard that knew exactly where I was staying (Vikran, a small village 15km southwest of Tromsø), showed conditions for the specific spots I planned to visit, and surfaced the data a serious aurora hunter actually cares about — Bz, not just Kp.
So I built one. Over a few evenings using Claude as a coding partner, I put together a single-page web app that pulls from NOAA's space weather feeds, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute's forecast API, and renders everything in a dark-sky-friendly interface I could actually read on my phone while standing in a field at midnight.
What started as a quick data dashboard kept growing. It ended up with:
- A 3D rotating globe (Globe.gl) centred on Tromsø with live cloud cover pins for every viewing location
- Go / No-Go scoring for each night combining Kp forecast and cloud cover
- The Grand Tour overlay — filming locations from "The Grand Tour: A Scandi Flick", which was filmed in the same area in March 2022
- A 60km radius from Vikran with 8 aurora viewing spots, each with their own live weather fetch from yr.no
- Sky cam links to live webcams near Tromsø
- iPhone camera settings for aurora photography
- Deployed to AWS CloudFront with full version management and a one-command deploy/rollback script
The whole thing is a single HTML file with no backend. Every data source is a free public API with no authentication required.
These were taken over three nights in Tromsø during the March 2026 trip. Conditions were exceptional — Kp reached 5 on two of the three nights and the skies cleared at the right moments each time.
All shot on iPhone with NightCap in Stars mode, handheld or propped on whatever surface was available at −5°C.
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| Aurora arch spanning the full sky over the Ramfjord — the best display of the trip | Intense vertical curtains shooting up from behind the mountain ridge near Vikran |
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| A single twisting aurora pillar and its reflection in the calm fjord water | Maximum activity — a full aurora storm swirling across the sky, viewed from Vikran |
The hero view is a Globe.gl 3D Earth that auto-rotates and flies into Tromsø on load. Viewing spot pins are colour-coded in real time by cloud cover: teal = clear, orange = partial, red = overcast. A toggle switches to the flat 2D Leaflet map for detail work.
Each of the three trip nights gets a score out of 10 combining:
- Maximum Kp forecast (3-day from NOAA, falling back to 27-day outlook)
- Average cloud cover over the dark hours (21:00 → 05:00) from yr.no
- Bz (southward = good) from NOAA DSCOVR satellite — the single most important indicator. A Bz of −10 nT or lower with clear skies = go out now.
- Kp index real-time and 3-day forecast
- Solar flare alerts from GOES-16 X-ray flux (Class C/M/X with plain English impact descriptions)
- Solar wind speed and density
Each viewing location gets its own yr.no forecast fetch, so you can see that Sommarøy (55km west) is clear while Tromsø city is overcast. Cloud cover, temperature, and wind chill per location, updated every 10 min.
Toggle a layer showing the four filming locations from The Grand Tour: A Scandi Flick (Amazon Prime, 2022) — including the Olavsvern submarine tunnel where James May crashed his Mitsubishi Evo VIII at 75mph and broke a rib. The episode was filmed in March 2022, the same month as this trip.
Links to three live webcams near Tromsø for a real sky sanity check before heading out.
Exposure, ISO, focus, and stabilisation notes for aurora photography on iPhone, with specific tips for iPhone 15/16 Pro.
All data is fetched client-side from free public APIs — no backend, no API keys, no cost.
| Source | What it provides |
|---|---|
| NOAA SWPC | Kp forecast, real-time Kp, Bz, solar wind, X-ray flux |
| Norwegian Met (yr.no) | Cloud cover, temperature, wind per location |
| ESRI ArcGIS | Dark map tiles for the 2D Leaflet map |
| Globe.gl / Three.js | 3D globe rendering |
| Client-side JS | Moon phase calculation |
Full details: docs/data-sources.md
Browser → CloudFront (HTTPS, OAC) → S3 (private)
On every page load / 10-min refresh:
Browser → NOAA SWPC (6 endpoints in parallel)
Browser → yr.no (9 location forecasts in parallel)
Browser → ESRI / CartoDB (map tiles on demand)
No backend. No Lambda. No database.
Total AWS cost: ~$0.01/month.
Infrastructure: AWS S3 (eu-north-1) + CloudFront (PriceClass_100), static file hosting with Origin Access Control.
Full details: docs/architecture.md
The app has three versions, all stored in S3 and deployable with a single command:
| Version | Description |
|---|---|
| v1 | Original 2D Leaflet map |
| v2 | 3D Globe.gl hero with 2D toggle |
| v3 | 3D Globe + Sky Cams webcam links (current) |
- AWS account (free tier is sufficient)
- AWS CLI v2 configured
- Python 3
git clone https://github.com/MaverickHQ/tromso-aurora-hunter.git
cd tromso-aurora-hunter
cp config.example.json config.json
# Edit config.json with your S3 bucket name and CloudFront distribution ID
chmod +x scripts/deploy.sh
./scripts/deploy.sh v3 # deploy latest version
./scripts/deploy.sh list # see what is in S3
./scripts/deploy.sh v1 # roll back to original
Full setup guide: docs/deployment.md
tromso-aurora-hunter/
├── index.html current live version (v3)
├── config.example.json copy to config.json and fill in your values
├── config.json gitignored — your real AWS resource IDs
├── .gitignore
├── versions/
│ ├── v1-2d-leaflet.html
│ ├── v2-3d-globe.html
│ └── v3-3d-globe-skycams.html
├── scripts/
│ └── deploy.sh version deploy + rollback script
├── docs/
│ ├── architecture.md
│ ├── deployment.md
│ ├── data-sources.md
│ └── grand-tour-feature.md
├── assets/
│ ├── screenshots/
│ └── trip-photos/
└── infra/
└── infrastructure.yaml
- Globe.gl — 3D WebGL globe
- Leaflet.js — 2D interactive map
- Chart.js — Kp forecast bar chart
- NOAA SWPC — space weather data
- MET Norway / yr.no — weather forecasts
- AWS S3 + CloudFront — hosting and CDN
- Built with Claude as a coding partner
MIT — do whatever you like with it. If you use it for your own aurora trip, I hope you see something spectacular.