About Stargazr

One tap: is tonight good for stargazing, right where you are?

Stargazr answers the one question every backyard skywatcher actually asks — is it worth going outside tonight? Rather than a wall of raw numbers, it reads the sky for your exact location and gives you a single, honest go / no-go, then explains why.

What we check

• Clouds first — the cloud forecast for your precise spot, not a regional average. It's the factor that makes or breaks a night.
• The Moon — phase, how lit it is, and when it rises and sets. A bright Moon washes out faint stars, the Milky Way and meteors.
• Aurora — the live Kp index and OVATION model, read for your latitude, so you know if the northern or southern lights could reach you.
• The next meteor shower — its peak date, realistic rates, and an honest read on how much the Moon will spoil it.
• Real darkness — when astronomical twilight ends and true dark begins for you tonight.

Where our data comes from

We build on open, authoritative sources and credit them plainly:

• Cloud forecasts from MET Norway (CC BY 4.0).
• Aurora and space weather from the US NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (public domain).
• Meteor-shower figures from the International Meteor Organization and the American Meteor Society.
• Moon and twilight computed locally with SunCalc; star positions from the Yale Bright Star Catalog (public domain), with the shared Astronomy Engine ephemeris.

Our approach to accuracy

We'd rather tell you the truth than oversell a night. The Moon-interference reads on our meteor-shower guides are computed, not guessed, and we say plainly when a year is a washout. The current tonight-conditions read is naked-eye accurate; an arcminute-accurate planetarium and telescope identifier are on the way. When we don't know, we say so.

Editorial standards and corrections

Everything time-sensitive on this site — a meteor maximum, an eclipse contact time, an opposition date — is written from a named primary source and carries a visible last reviewed date. Where sources disagree, we say so rather than picking the tidier number: a meteor shower's maximum is a window several hours wide, and any page that gives you a single guaranteed minute is overstating what is known.

When we get something wrong we fix the page and say what changed. In August 2026 an external audit found two errors worth naming here: the 2026 Perseids page presented a single-minute "sharp maximum" that no primary source supports, and the August 2026 lunar-eclipse page had greatest eclipse 29 minutes late. Both are corrected, and both pages now derive every local time from one verified instant instead of hand-written strings, so the same class of error cannot recur silently.

Most constellation and meteor-shower guides on this site are drafted with AI assistance against a structured reference of real star positions, magnitudes and shower data, then checked by a second, independent model instructed to reject any claim the reference doesn't support, before a person reviews and publishes it. Time-sensitive pages — eclipse times, meteor peak windows, opposition dates — are additionally sourced and reviewed as described above. We built it this way because we'd rather be upfront about how a guide was produced than have you find out by accident.

Spotted a mistake? corrections@stargazr.io reaches us directly.

Who runs Stargazr

Stargazr is operated in California by Oak and Main Developers LLC. No advertiser, telescope maker or retailer has any say in what it publishes. Oak and Main Developers LLC also runs a small portfolio of other single-purpose utility sites. The most closely related is Eclipsor, which covers solar eclipses; where we link to it, or to any other site in that portfolio, we say that it is ours. An editorial recommendation and a self-referral are different things and you are entitled to know which one you are reading.

The site carries Google advertising on its article pages. It carries no affiliate links and no sponsored content; if that ever changes, the affiliate disclosure sets out the rules we will hold ourselves to first.

General enquiries: hello@stargazr.io. Privacy: privacy@stargazr.io. Corrections: corrections@stargazr.io.

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Live sky map · Custom star chart · Constellations · Meteor showers · Planets · Lunar eclipses

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