Diary & Personal Viewing Log
The diary is your personal aurora-watching record. It automatically organises your snapshots into nights and gives you tools to review past conditions, spot patterns, and learn what works at your favourite locations.
How the diary works
Every snapshot you create — whether public or private — appears in your diary, grouped by night. A "night" in Lumina's world runs from noon to noon UTC, which neatly captures the full evening-to-dawn viewing window.
The diary main page lists all your nights, showing at a glance:
- The date and how many snapshots you took
- Whether you saw aurora that night
- The peak probability and conditions
- Moon phase and cloud cover summary
Tap into any night and you get the detail view: every snapshot from that night in chronological order, with the conditions at each moment and any notes you wrote.
Night summary
The night detail page gives you a complete picture of what happened:
- Timeline — all snapshots in order, showing how conditions evolved over the night.
- Peak conditions — the best probability, lowest Bz, highest HP, and strongest substorm activity during the night.
- Moon conditions — phase, illumination, and when the moon was up during the dark window.
- Location summary — where you were and the sky quality at each spot.
Similar nights
One of the diary's most useful features is the similar nights comparison. For any given night, Lumina finds other nights in your diary (and the community's public snapshots) that had similar space weather conditions. This helps you answer questions like:
- "Last time we had 80 GW and Bz at −15, did anyone see aurora from my latitude?"
- "Is this substorm pattern similar to the one I saw in March?"
- "What were the conditions like on that amazing night I remember?"
Similar nights appear as cards showing the date, conditions, and whether aurora was visible. You can tap through to see the full detail.
Using the diary as a learning tool
The diary becomes more valuable the more you use it. Over a season of watching, you'll build up a personal dataset that teaches you:
- What Bz level typically produces visible aurora from your usual locations.
- How much HP you need for the oval to clear your southern horizon.
- Which of your saved locations performs best under different conditions.
- How much moon you can tolerate before aurora becomes hard to see.
- What time of night tends to produce the best displays (spoiler: it's often around magnetic midnight, but your diary will tell you for sure).
This is the kind of local knowledge that no global forecast can give you. It's specific to your eyes, your locations, and your latitude.