About WhereSky
You are shown the night sky over an unknown place at a known instant, and you have to say where on Earth you are standing. It is celestial navigation, the way it was done before satellites, as a game.
Privacy, in one line
WhereSky has no accounts, sets no cookies, runs no trackers or advertising, and sends what you do in the game to no one. Everything the game remembers stays in your own browser.
What is kept, and where
The game keeps a few things in your browser's local storage, on your device only. They never leave it; there is no server to send them to.
- Your logbook: each round you played, where it was, your fix, your score, the stars you used and any note you wrote.
- Daily challenge progress, so a challenge can be resumed after a reload, and your streaks.
- Where you are in the tutorial, the training and the planetarium, so they can carry on where you left them.
- Settings: whether the sound and the music are on, which language you chose, and whether you have seen the welcome card.
To erase all of it, clear this site's data in your browser's settings. A private window keeps none of it past the window.
What reaches anyone else
The site is a set of static files: every round is generated in your browser, and nothing about your play is sent anywhere. The fonts, star catalogue and coastlines are served from this site itself, not from Google or any other third party.
Like every website, the company that hosts the files sees the ordinary details of each request for them, such as your IP address and browser, in its server logs. WhereSky does not add anything to those requests.
If WhereSky ever counts its visitors, it will be with a cookie-less, aggregate counter that identifies no one, and this page will say so before it starts.
Built on
- Star positions, brightnesses and motions from the HYG database v4.1 by David Nash (astronexus), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The star data files derived from it are shared under the same licence. Alpha Centauri's motion from SIMBAD, operated at CDS, Strasbourg.
- Coastlines from Natural Earth, public domain.
- The astronomy follows Jean Meeus, Astronomical Algorithms, and is checked against its worked examples in the game's own test pages.
- Type: Fraunces by Undercase Type, and IBM Plex Sans and IBM Plex Mono by IBM, all under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1 (Fraunces, Plex Sans, Plex Mono).
- The music, Gece Nöbeti, is composed for WhereSky and written in code; the browser plays it as it goes. Its strings, cellos, solo violin, piano, harp and the flute the pan flute is made from are recordings of single notes from VSCO 2 Community Edition by Versilian Studios, released into the public domain (CC0). Thank you. The oud, the ney, the bells and the sound effects are synthesised in the browser.
Places and borders
Rounds are described by their distance and bearing from the nearest of a few hundred reference places. Each place is listed with the territory it sits in, not with a claim about who owns it, and a round's own position is never assigned to a country. A star-navigation game has no view on borders.