Born From Space

The Earth from orbit, the stars overhead and the Moon on the day you were born, on one card you can keep and share.

Your birthday stays on your device. Only the requests to NASA GIBS (the satellite picture) and Open-Meteo (the weather) include the date and the city's map area. Nothing is stored, logged or sent to us.

What is on the card
  • From orbit: the NASA satellite picture of the place that day, about 260 km across, from MODIS on Terra and Aqua or VIIRS on Suomi NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21. Gaps between one satellite's passes are filled from another satellite the same day. Daily pictures exist only from 24 February 2000; for earlier birthdays the card says so and shows NASA's Blue Marble instead.
  • The sky that night: the whole sky above the city at the darkest moment of the night after your birthday (when the Sun was lowest), with every star to magnitude 6, the Milky Way, the planets and the Moon in its true phase. North is at the top and east on the left, as if you lay on your back with your head to the north. If the night was not fully dark, the stars you could not have seen are dimmed.
  • Season: the astronomical season for the city's hemisphere, from the equinoxes and solstices of that year, and the hours of daylight.
  • Weather: the day's high and low, and the main weather, from the ERA5 reanalysis (a reconstruction on a grid of about 9–25 km, from 1940 to about a week ago), not from a weather station.

Times are local, using the city's time zone with its historical daylight-saving rules as your browser knows them.

Sources and credits
  • Satellite imagery: We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS). Products: MODIS Terra and Aqua and VIIRS Suomi NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 Corrected Reflectance (true colour); Blue Marble: Next Generation. NASA does not endorse this project.
  • Weather: Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0, from the ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalyses: contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information. Open-Meteo's free API is for non-commercial use.
  • Sun, Moon and planets: Astronomy Engine by Don Cross (MIT).
  • Stars, constellations and Milky Way: data from d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn (BSD 3-Clause): XHIP stars (Anderson & Francis 2012), IAU constellations, Milky Way outline by José R. Vieira.
  • Moon map: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio, CGI Moon Kit, from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data.
  • Cities: Made with Natural Earth (public domain), populated places 1:10m.
  • Fonts: Go fonts by Bigelow & Holmes (BSD-style licence).

Full licence texts: THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md. The code is MIT licensed. Everything is served from this site; no fonts, scripts or trackers come from anywhere else.