Your desk now has a space-weather radar
Most of us only hear about space weather when it makes the news — a burst of auroras pushed unusually far south, a GPS hiccup, a radio blackout. But the Sun is active all the time, throwing off flares and vast clouds of plasma that wash past Earth days later. SkyWatch's Space Weather mode puts that activity on your desk as a live radar, with Earth at the centre and the Sun's recent outbursts plotted all around it. At a glance you can see what the Sun has been doing lately — and, more usefully, what's headed our way.
First, what are flares and CMEs?
The two things this mode tracks are solar flares and coronal mass ejections, and they're related but different.
A flare is a sudden, intense flash of radiation from the Sun's surface. It travels at the speed of light, so its effects — mainly radio blackouts on the daylight side of Earth — arrive almost the moment the flare happens. Flares are graded by class, with X-class being the most powerful (you'll see labels like X2.1 or M5.5).
A CME is the heavyweight: a huge cloud of magnetised plasma the Sun hurls out into space. CMEs move far slower than flares — typically a day or three to cross to Earth — but when an Earth-directed one arrives, it's what drives the big geomagnetic storms and the auroras that come with them. CMEs are measured by speed, in kilometres per second.
How to read the radar
Everything on the Space Weather scope encodes three things at once — direction, strength, and recency — so once you know the visual language, you can size up the whole situation in a second.
Direction — where on the Sun it came from
Direction is the angle around the dial. Straight up is Earth-facing — an event up there erupted from the part of the Sun pointed right at us, which is exactly the kind you want to pay attention to. Events to the left and right came from the Sun's eastern and western edges (marked E LIMB and W LIMB), aimed off to the side rather than at Earth. Each CME fans out as a cone in the direction it's travelling, and the width of that cone is the real spread of the eruption. Flares carry a small heading tick.
Strength — how powerful it was
Strength shows up as the blip's size and colour, running from green for weak through to red for strong, with the scale spelled out in the key at the bottom of the screen. The shapes tell you the type: flares are circles (the fiercest ones get a burst of spikes around them), and CMEs are diamonds. Each event's magnitude is printed right beside it — a flare's class, or a CME's speed.
Recency — how long ago it happened
Recency is the distance from Earth. A just-happened event appears out at the rim and slowly drifts inward toward Earth as it ages, passing rings marked 1d, 2d and 3d along the way. So an event sitting near the hub erupted about three days ago, while one near the edge is fresh.
The one that matters most is impossible to miss
With several events on screen, the key question is always: is anything actually pointed at us? SkyWatch answers that for you. Anything aimed at Earth is ringed and called out, so the event that matters most jumps straight out from the rest. The summary at the top tells you the totals — how many flares and CMEs are showing — and flags the speed of the most significant Earth-directed event.
By default the scope stays clean — just the planet, the events and their cones. Tap KEY at the bottom to briefly pop up the summary bar, each event's magnitude, and the colour scale for a few seconds, then it tucks away again so the view stays uncluttered.
Tap any event for the full story
Tap a flare or CME and you get the complete picture: its strength, when it happened, the direction it's heading and whether that's toward Earth, the region of the Sun it erupted from, and — for a CME — when its effects might actually reach us. It's the difference between "something flared" and "an X2.1 flare from active region 13664 three days ago, off-disk, with a strong radio blackout" — genuinely useful context, drawn straight from live space-weather data.
When the Sun is quiet
Not every day brings a storm, and SkyWatch is honest about that. When things are calm, the radar simply reads ALL QUIET — which, for the satellites, radios and power grids that solar storms can disrupt, is exactly the news you want.
Who it's for
Space Weather mode is a natural fit if you're an aurora chaser wanting an early read on whether a CME might light up your skies, an amateur radio operator watching for the conditions that scramble HF propagation, an astronomy enthusiast who likes keeping an eye on our nearest star, or simply someone who finds it quietly fascinating that the Sun is this busy and most of us never notice.
Unlocking Space Weather
Space Weather is one of SkyWatch's à-la-carte modes — a one-time unlock you can add whenever you like from the SkyWatch store, with no subscription and no license key to type. Once it's unlocked it appears alongside your other modes, ready to switch to from your phone. (Demo and loaner units arrive with it already on.)
👉 See SkyWatch and everything it can track — explore it here.
