Privacy

Who we are

Orion Skies is a free site for owners of DWARFLAB smart telescopes, with a members' community. It is run by a private individual, not a company, and is not connected to DWARFLAB.

If you only visit

• Your location. If you type a postcode or press Use my location, it is rounded to about 10 km and kept on your phone only. The rounded position is sent to our server to fetch the cloud and sky times for that area, and those answers are kept for up to 30 minutes so the same area is not fetched again. Your postcode itself goes from your phone to postcodes.io to look it up, and is not sent to us.
• Page counts. We count how many times each page is opened each day. Nothing about you is kept with that count: no IP address, no cookie, no device details.
• Server logs. Our web server records standard access logs (IP address, browser type, page and time). They are used only to find and fix faults, and are not used to follow anyone.

If you join

• Your account: your email address, your name, a username, your level, and your password stored as a one way hash, never the password itself. Your email address is never shown to other members.
• Your age: you confirm you are 16 or over when you join. We keep that you confirmed it. We do not ask for a date of birth or any document.
• Your area, if you set one: rounded to about 10 km, so no home can be found from it, and the name of the district. It works out your targets and alerts.
• What you share: posts, comments, pictures and how you took them, reactions, profile words and picture, friends and groups. These are for members only: they are not shown to people who are not signed in.
• Private messages: seen only by you and the person you send them to. We do not read them unless the law requires it or we are looking into a serious report.
• Your target list and your night log: your ticks, and the nights you log with their settings and notes. Your night log is private to you; the site's admin sees only how many nights have been logged, never what is in them.
• Points and badges, worked out from what you have done on the site.
• Reports and blocks you make, so moderators can act on them and blocks keep working.

Clear-night alerts

If you turn alerts on, your phone's browser gives us a push address, which we store with your account and the number of good hours you chose. When tonight looks clear and dark for your area, we send a wake-up to that address through your phone's own push service (Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft). The message carries no words; your phone then asks us for them. Turning alerts off deletes the push address straight away.

What we do not do

• No advertising and no tracking cookies.
• No Google Analytics or any other analytics service.
• We never sell or share your personal details.
• We never show your email address to other members.

Outside services

• Auroracast (our sister site) for sky times and the UK cloud regions, and Open-Meteo (the Met Office model) for hourly cloud and wind. Our server asks them, using only the rounded area.
• postcodes.io, asked by your phone when you type a postcode.
• Windy, whose cloud map is shown on the Cloud page and loads from their site.
• Google Fonts, which supplies the site's lettering, loaded by your browser.
• Sky pictures on the target pages are from the DSS2 survey through CDS in Strasbourg; they are copies kept on our server, so your browser does not contact them.

How long we keep it

Your account and what you share are kept until you delete them or delete your account. Deleting a post deletes it. Page counts carry nothing about you and are kept as totals.

Your rights

You can see and change your details in your account settings, and Delete my account there removes your profile, posts, pictures, comments, messages, target list, night log and alert settings for good. You can also ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, or to correct or delete it. If you are unhappy with how we handle your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Contact

Press Report on any post, comment, profile or message, or, if you are a member, message TPN_Explorer, who runs the site. An email address will be added here when Orion Skies moves to its own web address.

Other pages

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