xenophin

I built this because every astronomy tool I used assumed I was in the northern hemisphere, in a US timezone, with English-only feeds. I'm in South Africa — half the sky is different, the darkness windows are different, and most "tonight's sky" tools just don't work properly below the equator.

StarScope is a free web app (no signup required) that gives you:

• "Worth It Tonight?" verdict — fuses GFS weather forecast (cloud/seeing/transparency via Open-Meteo) with astronomical darkness calculations and moon interference into a single go/no-go answer. Clear Outside makes you eyeball three rows; this gives you the decision.

• Tonight's Sky panel — what's actually visible from your coordinates right now, computed with proper suncalc twilight (civil/nautical/astronomical), not just "it's dark". Handles edge cases like no astronomical darkness in summer at high latitudes.

• Real-time feeds — Arxiv, NASA GCN, MPC, NEO, ESA/Hubble, Sky & Telescope, NOAA Space Weather, all filterable by topic. Hemisphere-aware so southern observers aren't buried in Polaris articles.

• ISS passes, comet tracking, APOD — the daily utilities.

Technical bits: React + Express + tRPC, Open-Meteo GFS for weather (same model Clear Outside uses via 7Timer), suncalc for ephemeris, server-side caching so the free APIs aren't hammered. No tracking, no ads. The weather forecast is global — works the same whether you're in Cape Town or Copenhagen.

The "Worth It Tonight?" panel is what I'm most interested in feedback on. The scoring combines weather (cloud%, seeing, transparency), darkness (is there astronomical twilight tonight? when?), and moon (phase, altitude, illumination) into a 0-100 score. I'd like to know if the weighting feels right to experienced observers.

Try it: just allow location or type a city. No account needed.

thanks for the great feedback. Valid - we will tune messaging. But you have the correct idea on the product

Ah sorry let me explain. All my details were sold. So now when someone unknown phones my VM says Hi - if you know me text me who you are or email me on xen@opendm.co I got 20 unsolicited calls a day

Im having a personal fight with Oura ring. I thought this was hilarious then figured out the support team was run by LLMs. This is how it goes wrong. For an extra giggle look at the whole history.

This site scans the blockchain for newly minted rich media content and plays it. It clearly shows that the blockchain really needs to get proper content onto it. It's fun to watch though :-)

Launched a few NFT projects lately - and with Opensea not supporting EIP-2981 standard - I find this interesting.

SHOW HN: Experiment to compose NFTs and maintain the integrity of decentralization.

Paid for porn industry will carve out a niche - probably disrupt entire industry. Other users wont touch it. Guaranteed revenue for snapchat though.