CME TRACKER
Open the tracker →

Watch solar storms cross space — live.

The Sun regularly hurls billion-ton clouds of magnetized plasma into space. CME Tracker follows every one of them — from the moment NASA measures the eruption to the hour it reaches Earth's doorstep — on a real-time map of the inner solar system.

Open the live tracker Replay a famous storm
LIVE

Fresh from the Sun

What you can do here

🛰 Track storms in flight

Fresh NASA & NOAA data every few minutes. Each CME is drawn with its measured direction, width, and speed — so you can see at a glance whether it's aimed at Earth or sailing past.

⏱ Travel in time

The map is a time machine: run the clock forward to preview arrivals, or rewind and replay history — the 2024 Gannon superstorm, the 1859 Carrington Event, and more, with the real data behind them.

🌌 Get warned

Free two-stage aurora alerts: a heads-up days ahead when a significant Earth-directed CME launches, and a "go outside now" confirmation ~30–60 minutes before the storm hits. Sign up below →

The science, kept honest

Every arrival time here is a physics-based estimate — a drag-based model run on NASA's measured launch parameters — and it's labelled that way. Typical accuracy is around ±12 hours, storm strength is given as an honest range rather than a single confident number, and the model's real-world performance is published, not hidden. When a measurement outranks a model, the measurement wins.

How the tracking works, error bars included: the science page · plain-English guide: the manual

See it in 3D

NASA measures three numbers for every CME — direction, width, and how far above or below the Sun's equator it fired. A flat map can only draw two. Switch to the 3D view and each storm cone sits where it really is in space: some "how did that miss us?" storms finally make sense when you watch them sail over Earth's head.

LIVE · 3D

Try it from Earth's point of view: open the tracker in 3D →

The great storms, replayed

Every famous storm below is more than a story — it's a scrubbable replay. Watch the actual CMEs leave the Sun and sweep out to Earth.

G5May 2024

The Gannon Storm

A barrage of CMEs drove the first G5 storm in 20 years — aurora to the tropics, and the most-photographed in history.

Read & replay →
G5+September 1859

The Carrington Event

The most intense storm on record. Telegraphs sparked, aurora reached the equator — and it crossed from Sun to Earth in under a day.

Read & replay →
Near-missJuly 2012

The 2012 Near-Miss

A Carrington-class CME tore across Earth's orbit and missed — hitting a spacecraft that measured the superstorm we were spared.

Read & replay →

All famous storms →

Aurora tonight?

The question everyone actually has, answered in one glance: NOAA's real-time aurora oval, how far south it reaches right now, city-by-city visibility, the 3-night Kp forecast, and whether the Moon will wash it out.

The full outlook, city by city: Aurora tonight →

Put CME Tracker on your site

The live map above, the aurora widget, and a compact numbers card are all free to embed — a plain iframe, no scripts, no keys, live data included. Pick a widget, tune it, and copy the snippet. There's an open JSON API too, if you'd rather render it yourself.

Build your embed →

Know when the sky is about to light up

Subscribers get the two-stage warning: the days-ahead heads-up, and the measured go-now confirmation from the L1 monitor. No spam, unsubscribe in one click. (Privacy: we store your address and nothing else.)

© 2026 Mike DiCarlo · CME Tracker · sister site: Asteroid Tracker ↗ · Privacy