Privacy Policy

Overview

AstroLAB is a personal astronomy dashboard that runs in your browser. There are no user accounts, no sign-in, and nothing you do here is tied to an identity. This page describes exactly what does happen, including the parts involving other companies.

Data Stored On Your Device

The site stores your settings and lightweight cached content in your browser's localStorage so pages load faster and remember your preferences — for example your observing location and recently fetched feed data. This stays on your device; it is not transmitted to us. Clearing your site data removes it.

The site sets no cookies during normal browsing. (The operator's own private pages use a single functional cookie to remember an unlock; ordinary visitors never receive it.)

Hosting

The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. As with any website, Cloudflare processes requests on our behalf and records standard technical information — including your IP address, user agent, and the URL requested — in its edge logs for delivery, caching, and abuse prevention. See Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Data Sent To Third Parties

Most live data is fetched by your browser directly from the provider, which means your IP address and request metadata are visible to that provider, exactly as if you had visited their site. Depending on which pages you open, that can include:

NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center · Helioviewer · the Spaceflight News API · NASA · Open-Meteo · jsDelivr (which serves the star-chart library, so it sees every visit to the sky chart) · and the other sources listed on the Data Sources page.

Open-Meteo receives your approximate or precise coordinates when you request local observing conditions, because that is what the forecast is calculated from.

Feed Proxies

Some feeds are fetched server-side instead, through small Cloudflare Functions on this site, either because the provider doesn't allow direct browser requests or to cache the result. These cover launches, near-Earth objects and their orbits, fireball events, and the astronomical calendar. When a request goes through a proxy, the upstream provider sees our server rather than you — but the request still passes through Cloudflare's logs as described above.

Analytics

This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookieless and does not fingerprint or track individuals across sites. It reports aggregate figures such as page views and referrers so we know which pages are used and whether anything is broken. There are no advertising cookies, no behavioural profiling, and nothing is sold or shared with advertisers.

Device Location (GPS)

The site never requests your device's GPS position automatically. Location access happens only when you explicitly choose it for the sky chart or observing conditions, and only after you grant permission in your browser. You may deny or revoke that permission at any time. Searching for a place by name makes no GPS request. Your position is used to compute what's overhead and, for weather, is sent to Open-Meteo as described above; it is not stored on our servers.

External Links

Pages link out to observatories, agencies, catalogs, and reference sites. Those sites have their own policies and may set their own cookies.

Data Retention

We hold no database of visitors. Locally stored settings and caches stay in your browser until they expire or you clear site data. Cloudflare's edge logs and aggregate analytics are retained according to Cloudflare's own retention schedule.

Contact

For privacy questions, takedown requests, or corrections, contact hn-station [at] protonmail.com.