Terms of Service

Agreement

These terms are between you and Objective Labs, LLC, 2006 7th St N, Sartell, MN 56377, USA, who operate Lights Watch at lightswatch.com. By using the site you accept them. If you do not, please stop using it.

Lights Watch is free. There is no subscription, no paid tier, and nothing to cancel beyond deleting your account.

The forecast is a forecast

Space weather is genuinely hard to predict, and we will sometimes be wrong in both directions. We will tell you the aurora is likely on nights when nothing appears, and we will miss displays that turn out to be spectacular. Treat every number on this site as an estimate, not a promise.

Everything we show is derived from public data published by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, including the KP index, solar wind measurements, magnetic field readings and the OVATION aurora model. That data is provided by NOAA as-is, without warranty. It can be delayed, revised after the fact, or withdrawn without notice, and satellite instruments do fail. We also cannot see your weather: clouds, moonlight and light pollution decide whether you see anything, and we do not model them.

Your safety is your responsibility

Aurora watching means being outdoors, at night, in the cold, often far from other people. If our alert prompts you to go somewhere, the decision to go and everything that follows are yours alone. Check the road and weather conditions, tell someone where you are going, and do not drive while watching the sky. Nothing on this site is advice about whether any particular journey is safe.

Accounts

• You need a working email address, and you must be at least 16 years old to create an account.
• Sign-in uses a one-time code sent to your email. Anyone with access to that inbox can get into your account, so keep it secure.
• Give us real locations you actually want watched. Saved coordinates are yours; you can delete any of them at any time.
• You can close your account whenever you like by writing to support@lightswatch.com.

Alerts

If you turn on alerts, we will email or push you when conditions look favourable over a location you saved. We send them on a best-effort basis. Email can be delayed or filtered as spam, push notifications depend on Apple, Google or Mozilla delivering them, and our own alert engine can fail or be down for maintenance. A missed alert is not a breach of these terms. Do not rely on Lights Watch as your only way of knowing.

You can turn alerts off at any time from your account page.

Acceptable use

Please do not:

• Scrape or hammer our data endpoints. They are a thin cache in front of NOAA, and the upstream data is free — take it directly from NOAA rather than through us.
• Try to access accounts, data or systems that are not yours.
• Interfere with the service, or probe it for vulnerabilities without telling us.
• Create accounts automatically, or sign up addresses that are not yours.
• Republish our forecasts as though they were your own, or as though they were NOAA’s.

If you think you have found a security problem, we would genuinely like to hear about it at support@lightswatch.com before you tell anyone else.

What belongs to whom

The underlying space-weather data comes from NOAA and is US government work, not subject to copyright. The site itself — its design, code, wording and branding — belongs to Objective Labs, LLC. You are welcome to link to us, screenshot a forecast, and share what you see. You may not copy the site wholesale or pass it off as your own.

Lights Watch is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to NOAA, the National Weather Service, or the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

No warranty

Lights Watch is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, or error-free, or that the forecasts will prove correct.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Objective Labs, LLC will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for any lost profits, lost data, or wasted journeys, arising out of your use of Lights Watch — whether or not we were told such damages were possible. Our total liability to you for any claim relating to the service is limited to one hundred US dollars.

Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, these terms do not affect your statutory rights.

Ending it

You can stop using Lights Watch at any time. We can suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, and we can change or discontinue the service — it is a free project, and we make no promise that it will run forever. If we shut it down, we will give account holders reasonable notice by email so you can retrieve anything you want to keep.

Changes to these terms

We will update the date at the top when these terms change, and email account holders about anything significant. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept it.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Minnesota, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the state and federal courts located in Minnesota have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer resident in the UK or EU, you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of your own country and may bring proceedings there.

Contact

support@lightswatch.com
Objective Labs, LLC, 2006 7th St N, Sartell, MN 56377, USA

See also our Privacy Policy.