Navigate thebigger picture

POLARIS is a window on the planet as public agencies see it right now: the fires they map, the earthquakes their seismometers catch, the storms their forecasters follow, the aircraft volunteers’ receivers hear, and the satellites whose orbits are published every day.

None of this is secret. It is spread across a dozen agencies, formats and time zones. POLARIS gathers it on one globe, keeps each item’s source and time beside it, and links you back to the agency that reported it.

We would rather show less than show something invented. If a feed is down, the site says which one. If a position is an estimate, as every satellite position here is, the site says so and shows how old the estimate’s inputs are. Severity appears only where the source gives it.

POLARIS is not a surveillance tool. It does not track people or devices, recognise faces, or keep movement histories of individuals. Aircraft appear only by the identifiers they broadcast, and we do not look up who owns them or who is aboard.

Your visit stays yours. There are no accounts, no advertising, no analytics and no cookies. The only thing stored is a short list of your recent place searches, kept in your own browser so you can find them again. Weather and place searches pass through our server, so your browser never contacts those providers directly. The globe’s imagery tiles and event pictures do load straight from NASA’s servers.

Everything on the site, and how fresh it is, is described on the sources page. The globe is the place to start.