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Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

lumara-space.app

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Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#51

Post by beeswaxpat »

hersko wrote: post #43
beeswaxpat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not anticipate having a screensaver project on my bingo card on this day in 2026 but it is now so! I am guessing that most people would want to see the Sun videos for a screen saver, maybe a random wavelength on each screensaver instance? I will make an opensource repo to it that works on desktop-anything with a little GUI for user settings/preferences. EDIT: Or did you all mean basically replicating the site a…

I meant the whole page with the four sections, but maybe also enable any specific part as well would be cool.

Hmm I will think on this. An open source desktop widget could recreate the screensaver function, triggering on X minutes of inactivity, then minimize upon any user activity. I'll play around and see!

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#54

Post by beeswaxpat »

louis49 wrote: post #53

This is so sick! as a science nerd, i love this so much!!!

Thank you! I love that you love it! It's on mobile too, check it out!

Apple: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lumara-sun-moon-live-viewer/id... Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeswaxpat...

:D

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#55

Post by maximilianthe1 »

beeswaxpat wrote: post #47
Shakahs wrote: post #42

Looks very neat. You may want to optimize the content serving a bit, since it's currently hotlinking multiple large (30MB) videos at 2K resolution from https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov .

Yes, you're right about optimization, this what I'll do: - Switch default to 1024p instead of 2048p so file drops from ~30 MB → ~8 MB (4× smaller) - Proxy through existing Cloudflare Worker with edge cache - Add a /video/* route that fetches NASA URL once, caches at the edge - After 1st request per region, every subsequent visitor gets it from Cloudflare PoP = NASA bandwidth: ~50 hits/day instead of ~10,000! NASA loa…

This looks suspicisly like LLM answer

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#56

Post by beeswaxpat »

maximilianthe1 wrote: post #55
beeswaxpat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you're right about optimization, this what I'll do: - Switch default to 1024p instead of 2048p so file drops from ~30 MB → ~8 MB (4× smaller) - Proxy through existing Cloudflare Worker with edge cache - Add a /video/* route that fetches NASA URL once, caches at the edge - After 1st request per region, every subsequent visitor gets it from Cloudflare PoP = NASA bandwidth: ~50 hits/day instead of ~10,000! NASA loa…

This looks suspicisly like LLM answer

Half of it was a to-do list from an LLM response, Claude Opus 4.7, also why it was updated so fast :D

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#57

Post by beeswaxpat »

beeswaxpat wrote: post #33
SummSolutions wrote: post #30

Beautiful app! AppStore is working now! The solar imagery and overall UI are really clean; easy to use. It would be nice to see CME tracking added. Also, Stefan Burns would be a great person to share this with - his audience loves space weather content.

Thank you for the feedback and I'll look for Stefan Burns!

Update: I reached out to him on X :D

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#58

Post by adzm »

ebbi wrote: post #49

This is beautiful. Sorry about the potentially noob question: is there an API you plug into for the live moon phase? I'm building an app that could do with this live feed if it's easily available.

If all you need is the phase it is easily calculated; there are several examples in Google

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#59

Post by ebbi »

adzm wrote: post #58
ebbi wrote: post #49

This is beautiful. Sorry about the potentially noob question: is there an API you plug into for the live moon phase? I'm building an app that could do with this live feed if it's easily available.

If all you need is the phase it is easily calculated; there are several examples in Google

Thanks. I wanted the graphic of the moon that comes along with it, but not sure if that's generated procedurally or through the API? (as you can tell I'm a complete noob when it comes to this stuff). Currently I just use images of each stage of the moon, but it's static so not the most accurate.

Re: Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage

#60

Post by vidyava »

beeswaxpat wrote: post #15
vidyava wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add that "raw" is after a bit of postprocessing to make it pretty. When the SDO webserver went down a few months ago I rebuilt the L1 data processing pipeline from JSOC so we could still do outreach and there's a surprising amount of opinion that goes into the mapping of data to visualization for each wavelength. My composite movies came out looking more like an acid trip than solar data.

Touché — when the person who rebuilt the pipeline says it's not raw, it's not raw :) Is optical-flow interpolation a step too far for outreach, or fair game? Tempted to motion-interpolate (ffmpeg's minterpolate) the daily MP4s up to 60fps for Lumara— looks gorgeous but the in-between frames are extrapolated. You're totally right about "raw", I suppose I meant more straight from NASA APIs.

I personally would rather show actual data over interpolated data, but I don't know how many unphysical interpolation artifacts you're getting or whether that really matters at a public outreach level.

That said, if you felt like processing it yourself, the L1 files are available every 12-24 seconds, and preprocessed images are available ~1 per minute. The synoptic version you're using is about 1 frame every 3 minutes at 20 fps so you could just triple the framerate without needing any interpolation, or string together the images yourself.

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