Privacy Policy

The short version

Stargaze Atlas collects no personal information, requires no account, and sets no cookies of its own. The town finder and the "tonight" panel run in your browser. To keep the site free it shows ads through Google AdSense — the one third party that may set a cookie in your browser. The Advertising section explains exactly what that means and how to opt out.

“Stargazing tonight near me” and your location

If you tap “use my location,” your device shares your coordinates with your browser only. We use them in the browser to find your nearest rated town, and then discard them. Your exact location is never sent to us or stored.

To show that town's cloud cover and aurora odds, only the town's public coordinates — not your exact position — are sent to the public NOAA and Open-Meteo forecast services. Those are third-party services with their own privacy policies.

The town finder

The search term you type filters an embedded list in your browser — it is never sent to a server.

Analytics

Traffic may be measured with aggregate, privacy-preserving analytics that use no cookies and identify no individual — coarse signals such as page views and referrers, never who you are.

Advertising

Stargaze Atlas shows third-party ads through Google AdSense to help cover hosting and data costs. This section explains what that means for your privacy and how to control it.

Stargaze Atlas displays third-party advertisements through Google AdSense and Google's advertising partners. When ads are served, those ad networks may set and read cookies or use device identifiers to serve, cap, and measure ads — and, where permitted, to show ads relevant to your interests. This activity is controlled by the ad networks under their own privacy policies, not by this site.

Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies (including its advertising cookies) to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this and other websites. You can learn how Google uses information from sites that use its services, and control the data used to personalize ads, at these Google resources:

• How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services: policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites
• Google advertising and cookies: policies.google.com/technologies/ads
• Manage or opt out of personalized Google ads (My Ad Center): myadcenter.google.com
• Opt out of personalized advertising from many vendors at once: optout.aboutads.info (Digital Advertising Alliance) and youradchoices.com

The advertising partner in use is Google AdSense. If additional ad partners are ever added, this policy and the "last updated" date at the top of this page will be revised. Advertising never alters a published darkness class, Bortle estimate, or viewing-conditions forecast on this site — and it never affects which towns or dark-sky places appear, or how they are ordered.

Contact

Questions about privacy can go to contact@stargazeatlas.com.