Credits and data sources
Night Sky is built on openly shared data and software. Thank you to everyone who makes it available.
Data
- Light pollution
David J. Lorenz, from VIIRS satellite data
Shown as zenith sky brightness and the atlas's own zones, as the author asks.
- Weather
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com
Open-Meteo, from national weather services
- Stars
David Nash (Astronexus)
CC BY-SA 4.0. Our star catalogue derived from it (
/data/stars.json) is shared under the same licence.- Constellations, Milky Way and deep-sky objects
© 2015 Olaf Frohn
- Satellites
Dr T.S. Kelso
Orbital elements for the brightest satellites
- Descriptions and pictures
Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons contributors
Text under CC BY-SA 4.0. Each picture has its own licence, linked from the picture.
Software
- Astronomy Engine by Don Cross, for positions of the Sun, Moon and planets (MIT)
- satellite.js by Shashwat Kandadai and contributors, for satellite orbits (MIT)
- Next.js and React by Vercel and Meta, for the web app (MIT)
- Motion by Motion Division, for animation (MIT)
- Base UI and shadcn/ui by their contributors, for interface components (MIT)
- Bklit UI by Bklit, for charts
- Lucide by Lucide contributors, for icons (ISC)
- Geist by Vercel, for typeface (SIL Open Font License 1.1)
Methods
Moonlight is modelled with the method of Krisciunas and Schaefer (1991), and the faintest visible star with Schaefer's formulas for sky brightness and limiting magnitude. Read more about how it fits together on the About page.