Legal notice
Adastrum is a free, ad-free personal website, published on a non-professional basis.
Publisher
Website published by a private individual, Narayan, on a non-professional basis.
In accordance with the French law on confidence in the digital economy (article 1-1 of law no. 2004-575 of 21 June 2004, formerly article 6, III, 2), the publisher, acting on a non-professional basis, has provided their identification details to the host and does not publish them.
Contact: Narayan@adastrum.fr
For a question, to report a mistake, or to exercise your rights over your personal data (access, correction, erasure), including the hosting technical logs.
Host
Cloudflare, Inc.
101 Townsend St
San Francisco, CA 94107
United States
Phone: +1 650 319 8930. Website: cloudflare.com.
Domain name
adastrum.fr is registered with IONOS SARL
7 place de la Gare
57200 Sarreguemines
France
RCS Sarreguemines 431 303 775. Website: ionos.fr.
Personal data and cookies
Adastrum sets no cookies, and the site has no accounts, no analytics and no ads. It does not collect or keep any personal data on a server. The third-party services listed below apply their own rules.
On your device. The site keeps in your browser (local storage) the chosen theme and language, your observing location if you set it, and a copy of the latest data viewed, to be faster and work offline. None of this is transmitted. You can erase it all by deleting the site’s data in your browser.
Phone sensors. The viewfinder mode on the Tools page reads the phone’s compass and tilt, only after your consent and while it is open. These readings stay on the device.
Your location. It is only requested if you click “Use my location”, and it stays on your device. By default, the site only guesses a nearby city from the device’s time zone, without sending anything.
Services contacted by your browser. To display the data, your browser queries the services below directly, so they receive your IP address, as with any website visit:
- Cloudflare (website hosting, relay to Launch Library, CelesTrak and NASA’s JPL), which may keep technical logs;
- Open-Meteo (weather, and the time zone of coordinates you type or of the device location), which also receives coordinates rounded to about 10 km, and the city name if you search for one;
- CelesTrak (orbits), Launch Library 2 / The Space Devs (launches, crews), NOAA (space weather);
- NASA (picture of the day, Sun images), Wikipedia (missions), Spaceflight News API (news);
- wsrv.nl (resizing of news, launch and Wikipedia images) and the source websites of news and launch photos;
- the CDS in Strasbourg (hips2fits service), only if you turn on the real sky image on the Astrophoto page: it receives the coordinates of the frame’s patch of sky, never your location;
- YouTube (Google), on days when the picture of the day is a video hosted on YouTube: its thumbnail (i.ytimg.com) is shown, and the player only loads if you click “Play the video”; it then also contacts other Google services (www.google.com, googleapis.com, fonts.gstatic.com). The same goes for Vimeo.
Sources and accuracy
Data come from public sources (CelesTrak, Launch Library 2, NOAA SWPC, NASA and its JPL, Open-Meteo, Spaceflight News API, Wikipedia, the OpenNGC, SEDS and HYG catalogues, d3-celestial constellations) or are computed on your device (positions of satellites, the Sun, the Moon and the planets). They are provided as is, without warranty: a source may be late, wrong or stop responding. They must not be used for safety-critical decisions.
Credits and intellectual property
Texts, design and code: Narayan. NASA images: public domain. Astronomy Picture of the Day: the credit, and copyright where applicable, of each image is shown below it. Mission descriptions and images: Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Launch photos: credited, via The Space Devs. Map: Natural Earth (public domain). Messier catalogue and deep sky: OpenNGC (CC BY-SA 4.0), magnitudes completed from SEDS. Stars on the Astrophoto page: HYG v4.1 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Constellation lines and boundaries: d3-celestial, © 2015 Olaf Frohn, BSD licence. Jost and IBM Plex Mono fonts: SIL Open Font License. satellite.js and astronomy-engine libraries: MIT licence.
The star and deep-sky files of the Astrophoto page (sky.json and stars-*.bin) are derived from HYG and OpenNGC: selected, converted and brought to epoch 2026.5. They are redistributed under the same licence, CC BY-SA 4.0. Sources, licences and the full text of the d3-celestial BSD licence: LICENCES.txt.
Real sky images on the Astrophoto page: Digitized Sky Survey – STScI/NASA, colourised and converted to HiPS by CDS (CNRS/Unistra), cut out by hips2fits, a service provided by CDS. The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II) was made by the California Institute of Technology with funds from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Sloan Foundation, the Samuel Oschin Foundation, and the Eastman Kodak Corporation. The UK Schmidt Telescope was operated by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, with funding from the UK Science and Engineering Research Council (later the UK Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council), until 1988 June, and thereafter by the Anglo-Australian Observatory. Plate copyrights: archive.stsci.edu/dss/copyright.html.