ℹ️ Help & About
What this is, what's inside, how it was built, and the references behind the eyepiece.
About AstroLAB
AstroLAB is a personal astronomy dashboard and sky guide — a single place that pulls together what's happening overhead right now, an interactive star chart, and a reference library, built by one amateur astronomer and shared publicly.
What's inside
🏠 The Record — a live "happening now" feed: upcoming rocket launches, space headlines, astronomical events, and this month's calendar.
🌌 The Sky — an interactive star chart (search and jump to planets, stars, Messier and deep-sky objects) with tonight's moon phase, viewing conditions, and quick observing links.
☀️ Space Weather — current solar activity: storm scales, a live rotatable solar disk, a recent-activity time-lapse, flare watch, an aurora outlook, and a map of near-Earth asteroids passing close by.
☄️ Impacts — the history of things that have struck Earth: major meteorites, impact craters, airbursts, asteroids spotted before they hit, and a live feed of recent fireballs.
🚀 Missions — a catalogue of milestone space missions, crewed and uncrewed, each expandable into its full story, plus a live Artemis II tracker.
🛰️ Launches — upcoming and recent rocket launches with site, operator, and purpose.
🌊 Currents — a directory of the world's ongoing astronomical research programs and instruments.
📚 Library — readable reference pages: This Month's Sky (with a live "Tonight's Top Targets" list), the full 110-object Messier Catalog, Observing Guides tuned to this gear, and a Glossary.
How it was built
AstroLAB began as a single page lifted out of a larger "HAPPENING NOW" dashboard and was rebuilt from the ground up into its own site. It's deliberately simple under the hood — hand-written HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript with no framework, a shared shell that injects the nav and footer on every page, and one cohesive design system.
It runs on Cloudflare Pages (static hosting) with a handful of small Cloudflare Functions that proxy and cache the feeds a browser can't fetch directly. Most live data comes straight from public APIs in the browser. There's no build step, no framework, and no database — just files.
It was built in phases as an evolving personal project, and it keeps growing.
🔭 Your telescope (Celestron)
📡 Planning & observing
🪐 Imaging & processing
🌌 Catalogs & inspiration
Credits & data sources
AstroLAB stands on a lot of open data and tools: Launch Library 2 (The Space Devs) for launches, the Spaceflight News API for headlines, NOAA SWPC and Helioviewer for space weather and solar imagery, NASA/JPL SSD-CNEOS for near-Earth objects and fireballs, NASA resources for missions and imagery, In-The-Sky.org for the astronomical calendar, Open-Meteo for observing conditions, D3-Celestial for the star chart, GeoNames for place lookup, and Wikipedia & the SEDS Messier Database for catalog references. Hosting, storage, and serverless functions are provided by Cloudflare. The full list with licences lives on the Data Sources page.
Disclaimers & legal
Personal, educational use. AstroLAB is a personal, non-commercial project, shared freely in the hope it's useful to other amateur astronomers. Content is provided for general information, education, and stargazing convenience only — not professional, navigational, or safety advice.
No warranty. Astronomical, mission, and weather data may be delayed, incomplete, or inaccurate. Everything here is provided "as is" and "as available," without guarantees of accuracy, uptime, or fitness for any particular purpose.
Telescope & equipment safety. If you're driving a motorised mount — from any software — supervise it at all times. You are responsible for any damage to equipment, surroundings, or yourself. Keep a STOP control within reach, and never leave a slewing telescope unattended.
⚠️ Solar safety. Never point the telescope at the Sun without a proper full-aperture solar filter fitted over the front. Improper solar observing can cause instant, permanent blindness and damage equipment.
Trademarks. Celestron, NexStar, StarSense, SkyPortal, NexImage, and NexYZ are trademarks of Celestron, LLC. NASA, Artemis, and related names are property of the U.S. government / NASA. All other product names, logos, trademarks, and data remain the property of their respective owners. AstroLAB is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them; references are for identification and educational purposes only.
Liability. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the operator of this site is not liable for any loss or damage arising from its use or from reliance on its data or controls.
See also the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.