Terms of use & disclaimer

The short version

Sky Time predicts how good a sunrise, sunset or aurora might look. It is a hobby forecasting tool, not a safety service. The numbers are estimates produced by a model that is wrong on a regular basis. Do not rely on them for anything that matters, and never in place of an official weather forecast, marine forecast, or emergency warning. It is a product of Logical Rich Solutions, LLC. Everything here - the site, what it shows, what it can do, and these terms - is subject to change or withdrawal at any time, without notice.

The site, the apps, the forecasts and scores and everything else Sky Time makes are ours. You may use them for yourself. You may not copy them, scrape them, take the apps apart, or use our API or data feeds without written permission. These terms are a binding agreement: by using the site or the apps you accept them, and when you create an account you agree to them expressly (section 8a).

1. Informational use only, no warranty

Everything on this site is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation any warranty of accuracy, completeness, reliability, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. No guarantee is made that the site will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, or that any forecast, rating, time, photograph or other information shown is correct or current.

Predicted sunrise, sunset and aurora quality ratings are the output of an automated model built on third-party forecast data. They are opinions expressed as numbers, not measurements. Sun and moon times, golden and blue hour times, and aurora windows are calculated approximations and may differ from other sources.

2. Use at your own risk

You are solely responsible for your own decisions and safety. Photographing sunrises, sunsets and aurorae routinely involves travelling in the dark, unfamiliar terrain, roadsides, coastlines, cliffs, ice, cold, wildlife and private property. Before acting on anything you read here, check official forecasts, tide and marine information, road and trail conditions, access rights and local regulations, and use your own judgement. Never trespass, and never put yourself or anyone else at risk to make a photograph.

2a. The camera view in the app

The app's camera view draws the predicted position of the Sun, Moon and Milky Way over your phone's camera picture. It is a planning aid, not an instrument: the overlay depends on your phone's compass, sensors and location, all of which can be wrong - a compass near metal or magnets, a phone that has not been calibrated, an uncertain location fix - and the drawn position can be off by many degrees. Do not rely on it for anything where an error matters.

Never look at the Sun through the camera view or otherwise: the view does not protect your eyes, and holding a phone up to the Sun can damage its camera as well. Keep your eyes on your surroundings while the view is open - it is easy to step into a road, off a kerb or off an edge while looking at a screen held up to the sky. You are responsible for where you point the camera and for the privacy of anyone in front of it. A picture you save from the view is saved to your own phone and is yours: you are responsible for what it shows and for anything you do with it, including where and whether photography is allowed, the privacy of people in it, and how you share it. The sky markings on a saved picture are the app's estimate at that moment and carry no warranty; they are not evidence of where anything was.

3. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the site owner and operator shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, goodwill, time, opportunity, or for any personal injury, property damage or death, arising out of or in connection with your access to, use of, or inability to use this site, or your reliance on any information obtained from it - whether based in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability or otherwise, and whether or not the operator was advised of the possibility of such damage. Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, it is limited to the minimum permitted by law.

4. Third-party data, and credits

This site and its apps show data and software they do not own. Each source is credited here under its licence; no endorsement of this site by any of them is implied.

• Weather forecasts are computed on our own server with the open-source Open-Meteo software (AGPL-3.0, unmodified) from Open-Meteo's open data (CC BY 4.0), made from the forecast models of NOAA (GFS, HRRR, NBM, GEFS; US public domain), ECMWF (IFS and its ensemble; CC BY 4.0), Deutscher Wetterdienst (ICON; CC BY 4.0), Météo-France (AROME, ARPEGE; Etalab Open Licence 2.0), KNMI and DMI (HARMONIE; CC BY 4.0), the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com.
• Backup forecasts from MET Norway (CC BY 4.0).
• Past temperatures contain modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information (ERA5 reanalysis); neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use of it.
• Maps: OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), drawn with MapLibre GL JS (BSD 3-Clause, licence). Place features near a location also come from OpenStreetMap data (ODbL).
• Place names and search from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).
• Ground heights from the Terrain Tiles on AWS, built by Mapzen from sources including the USGS (3DEP, GMTED2010), NASA SRTM, NOAA ETOPO1 and Copernicus EU-DEM (produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union).
• Space weather and aurora forecasts from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
• Observed cloud contains modified NOAA GOES-19 and GOES-18 data (ABI Cloud Cover Layers, from the NOAA Open Data Dissemination program). NOAA does not endorse this site. Over Europe, Africa and the Middle East it contains modified EUMETSAT Meteosat data 2026 (MTG FCI Level 2 Cloud Type, from the EUMETSAT Data Store, CC BY 4.0), turned into low, mid and high cloud shares on a 0.1° grid.
• Weather radar contains modified NOAA MRMS data (Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor composite reflectivity, from the NOAA Open Data Dissemination program), and NEXRAD station information from NOAA NCEI. NOAA does not endorse this site. Radar over Europe: EUMETNET OPERA composite, CC BY 4.0, redrawn by Sky Time.
• Hurricanes, typhoons and tropical storms from the NOAA National Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Sky Time's impact ratings are worked out from their forecasts and are not official warnings: always follow your local authorities.
• Satellite cloud imagery in the app: imagery from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS), of NOAA GOES data and of Himawari-9 data from the Japan Meteorological Agency distributed by NOAA; and EUMETSAT Meteosat product 2026 (CC BY 4.0).
• Satellite orbits from CelesTrak.
• Rocket launches from The Space Devs (Launch Library 2), with RocketLaunch.Live for the next few when it cannot be reached.
• Faint stars and deep-sky objects in the app's sky view: the Tycho-2 Catalogue (ESA), via the CDS, Strasbourg; and OpenNGC by Mattia Verga (CC BY-SA 4.0), the list of galaxies, clusters and nebulae, which Sky Time shares under the same licence.
• Where spacecraft are in the app's sky view, from the Webb telescope to the Voyagers: NASA/JPL's Horizons system, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology.
• The launch record since 1957: inclinations and launch sites from Jonathan McDowell's General Catalog of Artificial Space Objects (CC BY 4.0), matched to the Launch Library's record by Sky Time.
• Aircraft positions from adsb.lol (ODbL).
• Eclipses, comets and the sky's positions from NASA (GSFC eclipse predictions by Fred Espenak; JPL) and the US Naval Observatory.
• Weather observations from the NOAA Aviation Weather Center and the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.

These providers make their own representations about their data. Their data may be delayed, incomplete, inaccurate or unavailable, and this site cannot correct it. Where we have changed or combined it - forecasts blended from several models, scores worked out from them - the result is ours, not theirs.

4a. Advertising

The site and its apps show no advertising at present. If that changes, this section and our privacy policy will say so before any ad appears.

5. What is ours

Sky Time - this website, the Sky Time apps, and the application programming interface (API) and data feeds behind them - is owned and operated by Logical Rich Solutions, LLC. Everything in it that is not third-party data or third-party imagery belongs to us. That includes:

• the Sky Time name and wordmark and the cloud-and-clock logo in all its variants, in which we claim trade mark rights whether or not they are registered;
• the design, layout, color scheme, icons, illustrations and written text of the site and the apps, including the stories in Sky Time Travel and World Events and their translations;
• the source code and object code of the site, the apps and the API;
• the forecasts, scores, ratings, rankings, timelines, event lists and every other result the service works out, and the way they are calculated, selected and arranged; and
• the databases we build and keep, including our forecast archive and the sky ratings our members contribute.

These are protected by copyright, trade mark law, the law of trade secrets, database rights where they exist, and these terms. All rights not expressly granted to you are reserved.

What you may do. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to read the site, use the apps on devices you own or control, use the forecasts to plan your own outings and photography, and link to any page. That licence is for your own non-commercial use and ends if you break these terms.

What you may not do without our written permission:

• copy, reproduce, republish, redistribute, sell or make derivative works from the site's or the apps' design, code, text, graphics or output, in whole or in part;
• use the Sky Time name, wordmark or logo - or anything confusingly similar - for your own site, product, service or account, or in a way that suggests association with or endorsement by us;
• scrape, crawl, harvest, mirror or bulk-download the site, the apps or their forecast data, by hand or by automated means (search engines indexing public pages under our robots.txt are welcome);
• use the site's or the apps' content or output to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine-learning model, or to build or improve a competing product or dataset;
• present our forecasts or scores as your own, or resell them; or
• frame the site, or present it within another site in a way that obscures its origin.

Nothing here restricts what you may do with data provided by the third parties credited in section 4 under their own licences, or with the photographs covered by section 6, whose rights belong to their camera operators. It also does not stop you quoting a short passage with attribution and a link, as ordinary fair use allows.

If you would like to use any of this - a screenshot in an article, the forecast data in a project, the logo anywhere at all - ask first through our contact form or at contact@skytime.earth. Permission is usually easy to get and costs nothing to request. Unauthorised use may be pursued, and no failure to act on one instance waives the right to act on another.

5a. The apps, the API and the data behind them

The Sky Time apps talk to our servers through a private API. The API, its addresses, its keys and the data it returns are for our own apps and this site only; publishing an address does not invite anyone to use it. Without our written permission you may not:

• access or use the API or any data feed except through the official Sky Time apps and this website, or build, run or distribute any other client, script, bot or service that does;
• reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, decrypt or otherwise try to derive the source code, methods, models or algorithms of the apps, the site or the API, except to the limited extent the law applicable to you allows despite this restriction;
• extract, copy or reuse an app's keys, credentials or internal addresses;
• get around, disable or interfere with any limit, key, sign-in or other protection - rate limits, access controls, or measures that stop copying; or
• modify, adapt, translate, rent, lend, sublicense or redistribute the apps, or make a version of them that runs without our servers.

Each app is licensed to you, not sold, under these terms and the terms of the store you got it from; where the two differ for that store's purposes, its required terms apply as well. If you would like API access for a project, ask - we may say yes.

6. Photographs and images

The site does not show camera photographs at present. Stills from publicly available third-party webcams are collected through the Windy Webcams API and from their public streams to check our forecasts against the sky; they are not published, and copyright in each remains with the camera operator.

If you are a rights holder and believe an image or other material on this site infringes your rights, tell us through our contact form or at contact@skytime.earth with enough detail to identify the material, and it will be removed promptly while the matter is reviewed. The same form reaches us for requests from camera operators who simply do not wish to be included.

7. Content you submit

Approved accounts can log observations, ratings and notes. By submitting them you confirm the content is yours to submit and grant permission to display, store and use it on this site, including as input to the automatic calibration of the prediction model. Do not submit anything unlawful, infringing, abusive, or that identifies other people without their consent. Submissions may be edited or removed at any time, for any reason or none.

8. Accounts

Accounts are granted at the operator's discretion and may be suspended or removed at any time. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for activity under your account. Do not share logins. Do not create accounts by automated means, or more than one account to get around a limit or a suspension.

8a. This is an agreement

These terms, with our privacy policy, are a binding agreement between you and Logical Rich Solutions, LLC. You accept them by using the site or the apps. When you create an account you agree to them expressly - by ticking "I agree" on the sign-up form, or when signing up with Google or in an app - and we record when you did and which version you agreed to.

If you break them we may suspend or end your access, block you, and take any other step the law allows. Because copying, scraping, reverse engineering or misusing the API can cause us harm that money alone would not put right, you agree that we may ask a court to stop it, in addition to any claim for damages, for breach of this agreement or otherwise. Sections 3, 5, 5a and this one continue to apply after your access ends. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest still applies, and that part applies to the fullest extent allowed.

8b. Which law applies

Logical Rich Solutions, LLC is a Florida limited liability company. These terms, and any dispute about them or about your use of the site or the apps, are governed by the laws of the State of Florida and the federal laws of the United States, without regard to rules that would apply another place's law. Any such dispute is to be brought only in the state or federal courts located in Florida, and you and we both agree to those courts' jurisdiction. We may also ask any court with jurisdiction to stop an infringement of our rights. Nothing here takes away a protection that the consumer law of the country you live in gives you and does not allow to be signed away.

9. Data we hold

For account holders: an email address, a hashed password, sign-in timestamps, display preferences, and the observations you submit. For visitors: ordinary web server logs and an anonymous page count. Your account details are not sold, and nothing is shared with third parties except as needed to operate the site or as required by law. Location is never collected from your device unless you explicitly grant permission by using the location control. Use the contact form or write to contact@skytime.earth to have your account and observations deleted. Our privacy policy sets all of this out in full, and governs where the two overlap.

10. Everything here is subject to change without notice

The site, its content, its features, its locations, its forecasts, its pricing if it ever has any, and these terms are all subject to change or withdrawal at any time, without notice. These terms may change with the revised version taking effect when posted here and the date at the top updated. Continued use of the site means you accept the current version. The site, its locations, its features and its predictions may change or be discontinued without notice.

11. Contact

Questions, corrections and takedown requests: our contact form, or contact@skytime.earth.