🛩️ Skylog

The flight tracker that remembers every plane it sees over your house.

🌍 Live Demo · 📖 Docs · 💬 Discussions

Pan anywhere on the world, see live aircraft. Click a plane for everything we know about it. Set a home location, and Skylog will silently learn the regulars over your roof.

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Why Skylog?

Every flight tracker on the internet is amnesic. Open Flightradar24, see a plane, click away — the app forgets it instantly. There's no concept of "your sky" because there's no concept of you.

Skylog inverts that:

• It's yours. No account, no tracker, no server. Your sky data lives only in your browser's IndexedDB.
• It remembers. Every aircraft Skylog renders gets saved with its callsigns, altitudes, and timestamps. After three days you'll discover that the 737 you keep hearing at 7 AM is the same airframe (UAL841) on the same daily route.
• It tracks specific flights. Paste a callsign, get a globally pinned flight + ETA to your home + a browser notification when it's 5 km out. The single-keystroke version of "is my partner's flight on time?".
• It's worldwide. Pan to Tokyo, Frankfurt, Dubai, Lagos — wherever the airplanes.live community has feeders, Skylog shows live traffic.

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✨ Features

	Feature	Status
🌍	Worldwide live aircraft map (every ADS-B-equipped plane in view)	✅
🧠	Persistent memory — every plane Skylog sees is saved to your device	✅
🔁	Pattern detection — finds your "regular visitors" by weekday + hour	✅
🎯	Track a flight by callsign — paste it, pin it, follow it globally	✅
🔔	Browser notification when a tracked flight is within 5 km of home	✅
🛰️	ISS + Celestrak satellite overlay with 90-min ground tracks	✅
📊	Daily digest: today vs yesterday, peak hour, top regulars	✅
📞	On-device acoustic model: estimate ground-level dB(A) of any pass	✅
🗂️	Searchable / sortable list of every aircraft in view	✅
🌐	Region presets: jump to Europe, Asia, Middle East, Oceania, etc.	✅
📱	Mobile responsive — works on phones	✅
⌨️	Keyboard-driven (f track flight, m memory, s satellites, ? help)	✅
🔒	Zero tracking. Zero cookies. Zero accounts. MIT licensed.	✅

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🆚 vs Flightradar24, FlightAware, ADS-B Exchange

	Skylog	FR24	FlightAware	ADS-B Exchange
Free	✅	Limited	Limited	✅
Open source	✅	❌	Some	Some
Self-hostable	✅	❌	❌	Partial
No account required	✅	❌	❌	✅
No third-party tracker	✅	❌	❌	❌
Per-aircraft persistent memory	✅	❌	❌	❌
Pattern detection ("regulars over your house")	✅	❌	❌	❌
Track a flight by callsign	✅	✅	✅	❌
Browser-native push alerts	✅	App-only	App-only	❌
Satellite overlay	✅	❌	❌	❌
Ground-level loudness estimate	✅	❌	❌	❌
Worldwide coverage	Community feed	Comprehensive	Comprehensive	Comprehensive

Skylog isn't trying to win on raw data quantity. It's trying to win on knowing about your sky.

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🚀 Run it in 60 seconds

git clone https://github.com/vnmoorthy/Skylog.git
cd Skylog
pnpm install
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:5173. That's it. No env vars. No accounts. No databases to provision.

Or skip the local install and try the live demo.

Self-host on your own subdomain

The main branch auto-deploys to GitHub Pages on push (see .github/workflows/deploy.yml). Fork the repo, enable Pages with source "GitHub Actions", and your fork is live at https://YOU.github.io/Skylog/ within minutes. No backend infra. No costs.

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How it works

 ┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │                         BROWSER                             │
 │                                                             │
 │  ┌─────────┐   bbox poll       ┌──────────────────────┐     │
 │  │ MapLibre│ ────────────────▶ │ airplanes.live API   │     │
 │  │ canvas  │ ◀──── states ──── │ (no auth, CORS-ok)   │     │
 │  └─────┬───┘                   └──────────────────────┘     │
 │        │ rAF dead-reckoning                                 │
 │        │ at 10 Hz between polls                             │
 │        ▼                                                    │
 │  ┌──────────────┐                                           │
 │  │  React UI    │   sightings   ┌───────────────────┐       │
 │  │  - FlightCard│ ────────────▶ │   IndexedDB       │       │
 │  │  - DigestCard│ ◀── memory ── │   (Dexie schema)  │       │
 │  │  - Memory    │               └───────────────────┘       │
 │  └──────────────┘                                           │
 │                                                             │
 │  ┌──────────────┐    ┌──────────────────┐                   │
 │  │ TLE worker   │ ── │ Celestrak (TLE)  │  satellite.js     │
 │  │ (sat orbits) │    └──────────────────┘  SGP4 client-side │
 │  └──────────────┘                                           │
 └─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Stack: Vite · React 18 · TypeScript strict · Tailwind · Zustand · Dexie · MapLibre GL · D3 scales · satellite.js · Web Worker for the home-radius pass logger.

Data sources:

• airplanes.live — community ADS-B network, CORS-safe, no key needed
• Celestrak — TLEs for satellite propagation
• CARTO — dark basemap tiles
• OpenSky aircraft DB — bundled aircraft type / operator metadata

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🧠 The memory feature, explained

This is the differentiator. Every aircraft that enters your viewport is folded into IndexedDB:

interface AircraftSighting {
  icao24: string;
  lastCallsign: string | null;
  callsigns: readonly string[];     // every distinct callsign used
  registration: string | null;
  typecode: string | null;
  operator: string | null;
  firstSeenAt: number;              // unix-ms
  lastSeenAt: number;
  sightingCount: number;            // total polls including this aircraft
  dayCount: number;                 // distinct UTC days seen
  maxAltitudeM: number | null;
  minAltitudeM: number | null;
  recentDays: string;               // CSV of last 30 YYYY-MM-DD
  recentTimes: string;              // CSV of last 100 timestamps
}

The recentTimes slice powers dominantPattern(): bucket sightings by (weekday, hour) and surface any cluster of 3+ as a "regular visitor". After a week of leaving a tab open, the memory drawer reads:

Regular visitors over your sky: CMP809 — Tuesdays around 07:00, ×7 sightings OCN642 — Tuesdays around 07:00, ×6 sightings BAW185 — Saturdays around 13:00, ×4 sightings

That's not data Flightradar24 will ever show you, because Flightradar24 doesn't know what your sky looks like.

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🔬 The acoustic model (when home is set)

For each aircraft sample, Skylog estimates ground-level A-weighted SPL using:

1. Inverse-square law for geometric spreading: L(r) = L_src - 20·log₁₀(r/1m)
2. ISO 9613-2:1996 §7.2 atmospheric absorption: α ≈ 0.005 dB/m at 10°C / 60% RH for broadband aircraft noise (~500–1000 Hz)

Combined: L_observed = L_source - 20·log₁₀(r_slant) - α·r_slant

Source levels are calibrated per ICAO aircraft category (HEAVY=140 dB, LARGE=135, SMALL=125, LIGHT=105, ROTORCRAFT=130) against published FAA flyover data. Constants and citations: src/lib/acoustics.ts.

A 737 at 3,000 ft directly overhead → ~71 dB. Roughly the volume of a vacuum cleaner in the next room.

What the model deliberately doesn't do: ground reflection, directivity, thrust modulation, per-frequency absorption, weather. The goal is to distinguish a 747 from a Cessna at a glance, not to replace a certified noise meter.

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⌨️ Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
f	Track a specific flight by callsign
m	Open the aircraft memory drawer
s	Toggle satellite overlay
l	Toggle the in-view aircraft list
h	Open home setup
t	Open the pass timeline (requires home)
?	Show this help
esc	Close the active panel

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🛠️ Development

pnpm install
pnpm dev          # vite dev server on :5173
pnpm typecheck    # tsc -b --noEmit
pnpm test         # 101 unit tests
pnpm build        # production build
pnpm preview      # serve the production build
pnpm build:data   # optional: pre-fetch OpenSky aircraft DB for richer detail panel

Strict TypeScript throughout, no any. Coverage focuses on src/lib/ (geo math, acoustics, callsign parsing, dead-reckoning, sightings).

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🗺️ Roadmap

These are open issues — PRs welcome:

• Mobile installable PWA + offline support
• Time-machine: scrub backward through the last few minutes
• Webhook notifications (Discord, Slack) for tracked flights
• Public "share your sky" URL with stats
• Pluggable data sources (OpenSky direct via reverse proxy, ADS-B Exchange API)
• Plane fact cards (Wikipedia / aviation-trivia integration)
• Multi-home support
• Light theme

See issues with the good-first-issue label for places to start contributing.

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🤝 Contributing

PRs welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md first. The codebase is small and well-tested — adding a feature or fixing a bug should be straightforward.

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📜 License

MIT. Use it for whatever you want.

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🙏 Acknowledgements

Skylog stands on the shoulders of:

• airplanes.live — the live ADS-B feed
• OpenSky Network — aircraft metadata DB
• Celestrak — satellite TLE feed
• CARTO — dark basemap
• MapLibre GL — the open-source vector map renderer
• satellite.js — SGP4 orbital propagator
• Dexie — wonderful IndexedDB wrapper

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Built because I wanted to know which plane keeps waking me up at 3 AM.

If Skylog is useful to you, ⭐ star this repo so others find it.