Legal

Terms of use & disclaimer

Last updated 3 October 2026.

The short version

Sky Time predicts how good a sunrise, sunset or aurora might look. It is a hobby forecasting tool, not a safety service. The numbers are estimates produced by a model that is wrong on a regular basis. Do not rely on them for anything that matters, and never in place of an official weather forecast, marine forecast, or emergency warning. It is a product of Logical Rich Solutions, LLC. Everything here - the site, what it shows, what it can do, and these terms - is subject to change or withdrawal at any time, without notice.

1. Informational use only, no warranty

Everything on this site is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including without limitation any warranty of accuracy, completeness, reliability, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. No guarantee is made that the site will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, or that any forecast, rating, time, photograph or other information shown is correct or current.

Predicted sunrise, sunset and aurora quality ratings are the output of an automated model built on third-party forecast data. They are opinions expressed as numbers, not measurements. Sun and moon times, golden and blue hour times, and aurora windows are calculated approximations and may differ from other sources.

2. Use at your own risk

You are solely responsible for your own decisions and safety. Photographing sunrises, sunsets and aurorae routinely involves travelling in the dark, unfamiliar terrain, roadsides, coastlines, cliffs, ice, cold, wildlife and private property. Before acting on anything you read here, check official forecasts, tide and marine information, road and trail conditions, access rights and local regulations, and use your own judgement. Never trespass, and never put yourself or anyone else at risk to make a photograph.

2a. The camera view in the app

The app's camera view draws the predicted position of the Sun, Moon and Milky Way over your phone's camera picture. It is a planning aid, not an instrument: the overlay depends on your phone's compass, sensors and location, all of which can be wrong - a compass near metal or magnets, a phone that has not been calibrated, an uncertain location fix - and the drawn position can be off by many degrees. Do not rely on it for anything where an error matters.

Never look at the Sun through the camera view or otherwise: the view does not protect your eyes, and holding a phone up to the Sun can damage its camera as well. Keep your eyes on your surroundings while the view is open - it is easy to step into a road, off a kerb or off an edge while looking at a screen held up to the sky. You are responsible for where you point the camera and for the privacy of anyone in front of it. A picture you save from the view is saved to your own phone and is yours: you are responsible for what it shows and for anything you do with it, including where and whether photography is allowed, the privacy of people in it, and how you share it. The sky markings on a saved picture are the app's estimate at that moment and carry no warranty; they are not evidence of where anything was.

3. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the site owner and operator shall not be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, goodwill, time, opportunity, or for any personal injury, property damage or death, arising out of or in connection with your access to, use of, or inability to use this site, or your reliance on any information obtained from it - whether based in contract, tort, negligence, strict liability or otherwise, and whether or not the operator was advised of the possibility of such damage. Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, it is limited to the minimum permitted by law.

4. Third-party data, and credits

This site and its apps show data and software they do not own. Each source is credited here under its licence; no endorsement of this site by any of them is implied.

  • Weather forecasts are computed on our own server with the open-source Open-Meteo software (AGPL-3.0, unmodified) from Open-Meteo's open data (CC BY 4.0), made from the forecast models of NOAA (GFS, HRRR, NBM, GEFS; US public domain), ECMWF (IFS and its ensemble; CC BY 4.0), Deutscher Wetterdienst (ICON; CC BY 4.0), Météo-France (AROME, ARPEGE; Etalab Open Licence 2.0), KNMI and DMI (HARMONIE; CC BY 4.0), the Japan Meteorological Agency, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com.
  • Backup forecasts from MET Norway (CC BY 4.0).
  • Past temperatures contain modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information (ERA5 reanalysis); neither the European Commission nor ECMWF is responsible for any use of it.
  • Maps: OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), drawn with MapLibre GL JS (BSD 3-Clause, licence). Place features near a location also come from OpenStreetMap data (ODbL).
  • Place names and search from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).
  • Ground heights from the Terrain Tiles on AWS, built by Mapzen from sources including the USGS (3DEP, GMTED2010), NASA SRTM, NOAA ETOPO1 and Copernicus EU-DEM (produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union).
  • Space weather and aurora forecasts from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
  • Observed cloud contains modified NOAA GOES-19 and GOES-18 data (ABI Cloud Cover Layers, from the NOAA Open Data Dissemination program). NOAA does not endorse this site.
  • Satellite cloud imagery in the app: imagery from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS), of NOAA GOES data and of Himawari-9 data from the Japan Meteorological Agency distributed by NOAA; and EUMETSAT Meteosat product 2026 (CC BY 4.0).
  • Satellite orbits from CelesTrak.
  • Rocket launches from The Space Devs (Launch Library 2).
  • Aircraft positions from adsb.lol (ODbL).
  • Eclipses, comets and the sky's positions from NASA (GSFC eclipse predictions by Fred Espenak; JPL) and the US Naval Observatory.
  • Weather observations from the NOAA Aviation Weather Center and the Iowa Environmental Mesonet.
  • Live camera stills through the Windy Webcams API, © their respective operators.

These providers make their own representations about their data. Their data may be delayed, incomplete, inaccurate or unavailable, and this site cannot correct it. Where we have changed or combined it - forecasts blended from several models, scores worked out from them - the result is ours, not theirs.

4a. Advertising

The site and its free apps show advertising supplied by third parties. An ad is not an endorsement: we do not choose the individual advertisers, and we are not responsible for their content, products or services, or for anything that happens between you and an advertiser. How advertising partners use information, and your choices about it, are set out in our privacy policy.

5. Our name, logo and content

Everything on this site that is not third-party data or third-party imagery is the property of Logical Rich Solutions, LLC, which owns and operates Sky Time. That includes the Sky Time name and wordmark, the cloud-and-clock logo in all its variants, the site's design, layout, color scheme, icons and written text, the source code behind it, and the forecasts, scores, timelines and other output the site generates. These are protected by copyright, and rights in the name and logo are claimed as trade marks whether or not they are registered. All rights are reserved.

You are welcome to read the site, use its forecasts to plan your own photography, and link to any page on it. You may not, without written permission:

  • copy, reproduce, republish or redistribute the site's design, code, text or graphics, in whole or in part;
  • use the Sky Time name, wordmark or logo - or anything confusingly similar - for your own site, product, service or account, or in a way that suggests association with or endorsement by this site;
  • systematically scrape, harvest, mirror or bulk-download the site or its forecast data, whether by hand or by automated means;
  • use the site's content or output to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine-learning model;
  • present the site's forecasts as your own, or resell them; or
  • frame the site, or present it within another site in a way that obscures its origin.

Nothing here restricts what you may do with data provided by the third parties credited in section 4 under their own licences, or with the photographs covered by section 6, whose rights belong to their camera operators. It also does not stop you quoting a short passage with attribution and a link, as ordinary fair use allows.

If you would like to use any of this - a screenshot in an article, the forecast data in a project, the logo anywhere at all - ask first through our contact form or at contact@skytime.earth. Permission is usually easy to get and costs nothing to request. Unauthorised use may be pursued, and no failure to act on one instance waives the right to act on another.

6. Photographs and images

The camera images shown on this site are not our own. They are stills captured from publicly available third-party webcams through the Windy Webcams API. Copyright in each image remains with the camera operator or other rights holder. They are reproduced here in small, unmodified form for the informational and illustrative purpose of showing the sky conditions at a given location and time, alongside attribution to the source service. No ownership is claimed, and no licence to reuse them is granted by this site - if you want to use one for anything, seek permission from the camera's operator.

If you are a rights holder and believe an image or other material on this site infringes your rights, tell us through our contact form or at contact@skytime.earth with enough detail to identify the material, and it will be removed promptly while the matter is reviewed. The same form reaches us for requests from camera operators who simply do not wish to be included.

7. Content you submit

Approved accounts can log observations, ratings and notes. By submitting them you confirm the content is yours to submit and grant permission to display, store and use it on this site, including as input to the automatic calibration of the prediction model. Do not submit anything unlawful, infringing, abusive, or that identifies other people without their consent. Submissions may be edited or removed at any time, for any reason or none.

8. Accounts

Accounts are granted at the operator's discretion and may be suspended or removed at any time. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for activity under your account. Do not share logins.

9. Data we hold

For account holders: an email address, a hashed password, sign-in timestamps, display preferences, and the observations you submit. For visitors: ordinary web server logs and an anonymous page count. Your account details are not sold, and nothing is shared with third parties except as needed to operate the site, by advertising partners as the privacy policy describes, or as required by law. Location is never collected from your device unless you explicitly grant permission by using the location control. Use the contact form or write to contact@skytime.earth to have your account and observations deleted. Our privacy policy sets all of this out in full, and governs where the two overlap.

10. Everything here is subject to change without notice

The site, its content, its features, its locations, its forecasts, its pricing if it ever has any, and these terms are all subject to change or withdrawal at any time, without notice. These terms may change with the revised version taking effect when posted here and the date at the top updated. Continued use of the site means you accept the current version. The site, its locations, its features and its predictions may change or be discontinued without notice.

11. Contact

Questions, corrections and takedown requests: our contact form, or contact@skytime.earth.