April 28, 2026
Sun’s out, takes out
Show HN: Live Sun and Moon Dashboard with NASA Footage
Free NASA-powered sun–moon app sparks jokes, nitpicks, and screensaver nostalgia
TLDR: A free, privacy-first app streams NASA Sun footage and tracks Moon phases, live on Android with iOS pending. Commenters celebrated the no-tracking promise, joked about the eight-minute “live” delay, nitpicked the App Store link, and debated the Sun’s rotation—all while demanding screensaver vibes for their desktops.
Space nerds and casual sky-watchers swarmed a new indie dashboard streaming NASA’s Sun footage and tracking the Moon, and the comment section went supernova. The loudest cheer? It’s free, no ads, no tracking, built by a solo dev. The loudest quibble? Whether “live” counts when sunlight needs about eight minutes to reach us. One wag nailed the vibe with a wink: it’s live… with a cosmic delay. Cue a mini–semantics war that somehow made everyone love it more.
Nostalgia rocked the thread too. Fans begged for old-school screensavers to make a comeback, because the looping solar timelapse is basically the chill desktop of everyone’s dreams. Then the internet’s QA squad pounced: the App Store badge links to a legal page, sparking mild panic until folks noted iOS is “coming soon” and Android is already live on Google Play. Meanwhile, an armchair-astronomy debate flared over why the Sun’s daily rotation looks bigger than expected in the timelapse—was it the outer atmosphere moving, the camera angle, or just our eyes?
And of course, the memes. One commenter swore they “can see Claude” in the plasma swirls, turning the corona into a Rorschach test. Verdict: between the privacy-first promise and the space-weather eye candy, the community’s hooked—and loudly opinionated.
Key Points
- •Lumara provides live solar imagery from NASA’s SDO in 12 wavelengths and a 24-hour AIA 171 Å timelapse.
- •The app computes moon phases, illumination, rise/set times, and distance offline using Jean Meeus’s methods.
- •Space weather is tracked in real time via NASA’s DONKI, covering flares, CMEs, and geomagnetic storms (G1–G5).
- •Privacy-first design: no accounts, tracking, or ads; on-device location selection; images fetched directly from NASA servers.
- •Android app is available on Google Play; a universal iOS build was submitted to Apple Review on 2026-04-27.