This last year of 2024 was definitely the year of the auroras in Europe and especially in low latitudes such as France and Switzerland. With several nights where the sky turned red, a lot of people were lucky enough to see the phenomenon and photograph it. As you might now, I like the sky and I like photographing stuff in the sky. And yet I missed all those events, always with the same fashion. I usually check the aurora status using spaceweather, sometimes, I will log every day, but most times, I simply am not thinking about it, or I am doing something else that takes my time. And recently, it was always the case that the geomagnetic storms were happening during such a moment where I would not check the spaceweather website. I would check the news in the morning and realize that there were auroras, and I had missed them again! And it happened again a few days ago, with a G4 storm that triggered some auroras visible in France.
But not anymore! I guess you see where this is going: I automatized checking the space weather situation and made it so that it is sending me a notification on my phone when something significant is on the verge of happening.
I found that NOAA has a few json files available online that contains the geomagnetic storm level information estimated and predicted for the near future. It is relatively easy to automatize fetching that json file and checking the data to see if there are any G4 or G5 magnetic storms which might make some lights in low altitude regions. So I wrote that small python script that does just that! I call it AuroraWatch. Github link here: https://github.com/opto-mario/AuroraWatch
It is extremely simple: It fetches the json data from the NOAA website, identify the prediction and estimation field data and checks if there are G4 or G5 level storms. If it finds those, it sends a notification to my phone and I will hope that the sky is clear to see the spectacle.
The notification for the phone is done using the pushover.net app, which I found rather easy to use, and pretty convenient for this kind of application. All I have to do is send a message to some website using my credential and the app token, and voila, my phone receives the message! Plus it is not too expensive, with less than 5 bucks, my wallet will survive the hit.
Now to run the script. I have recently bought a synology NAS and I noticed that it was possible to perform regular tasks. There is also the option to have docker and containers on the NAS using container manager. You again see where this is going. I created a docker image of my script, sent it to my NAS, created a container there and run that container every day at the same time to check for auroras and send me a notification if it does.
Overall, the process was straigthforward. The only major issue I encountered was regarding the build architecture from my dev machine (arm64) which was different from the NAS architecture (x86_64). I somehow was under the impression that my dev machine was x86_64, but that was the old one, I recently changed it, just a few weeks ago, and I am still getting used to it. I kept getting the same “exec error” when running the container. Once this was solved, the error stopped and the script was running as expected.
Hopefully, I will be notified when the next aurora is happening and this time I won’t miss it again!
I do realize that it is feasible to send the alert message to more than me. The pushover app allows for thousands of notifications to be sent, for a fee at some point. I guess that if you are interested in receiving the message, you can leave a comment une. If there is enough interest for this, I will send the link to subscribe to the notification that I do for a small fee of $1 per month, $10 a year. Not that it will spam you with notifications all the time, the goal is to only send a notification when the geomagnetic storm is G4 or G5 level, so… 300 times every cycle of 11 years, more often during solar maximum.