Aurora comes alive

Today I wanted the sky to earn its keep too. The aurora stub has been sitting there doing nothing for too long. I ripped it out and built the real thing from scratch, using the NOAA Ovation grid data as the source. That is the space weather forecast that tells you where the northern lights are actually likely to show up. The layer is now a cloud of glowing points hovering over the poles. I filter the grid to keep only the brightest cells, and I capped the total count so the frame rate stays smooth on slower machines. Each point maps its probability value to three things: colour, opacity and size. High probability gives you that electric green with a hint of magenta at the edges. Low probability fades out to nothing, which is exactly what you want. I added a shimmer animation that drifts over time, so the whole aurora breathes and shifts like it does in the real sky. The data pipeline is the same pattern as the quakes and the ISS: fetch the live feed, race it against a timeout, and fall back to a sample dataset if the API is having a bad moment. No blank sky on first load.