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AI Transparency

Where Nightbase uses AI to write — and where it does not.

Nightbase uses AI as a writing tool. Some of the prose here started life as an AI draft. This page says exactly where that happens, what it never touches, and who is responsible for the result.

Where AI helps write

AI assistance is used for the prose in these places:

  • The articles in the Articles section.
  • The description, observing tips, history and fun facts on catalog object pages.
  • The biographies of famous astronomers.
  • The descriptions of surface features on the Moon and the planets.
  • The introductory paragraph of the nightly sky digest.
  • Session and blog summaries, when you choose to generate one.
  • Suggested descriptions for equipment entries.
  • The immediate automatic reply to a message sent through the contact form. A personal answer follows separately.
  • The translation of the site into every language other than English.
  • The mission radio voices in the Moon Lander game — except Apollo 11, which uses the original NASA recordings.
  • The support chat assistant, which is marked "AI" in its own header.

Who is responsible for what you read

AI drafts, a human edits. Every text published on Nightbase is read and edited before it goes online by Matthias Wüllenweber, who holds editorial responsibility for the content of this site. AI is used here as a writing and translation aid, not as an unsupervised author.

The facts stay with the sources. Coordinates, magnitudes, distances, orbital elements and dates come from the catalogs and the ephemeris calculations credited on the Licenses page — never from a language model. The numbers in the data tables are measured values, not prose.

What is not AI-generated

None of the following is AI-generated. Measurements and images come from the sources credited on the Licenses page:

  • Catalog and star data (Messier, NGC, IC, Caldwell, Hipparcos, Tycho, Gaia) — taken from the published astronomical catalogs.
  • Ephemerides, orbits and rise and set times — calculated from JPL and VSOP87 elements.
  • Visibility scores and difficulty ratings — a deterministic model based on aperture, sky brightness and the surface brightness of the object.
  • Sky survey images, NASA and ESA photography, and the relief data of Moon, Mars and Earth behind the 3D globes.
  • The original Apollo air-to-ground recordings and NASA mission audio — real archive tape, not synthesized.
  • Your observations, notes, sketches and photos. They are yours, they are never AI-generated, and they are not used to train AI models.

Machine translation

Nightbase is written in English. Every other language version is produced by machine translation. The German version is reviewed by the site owner; Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese and Korean are not proofread by a native speaker. Translated articles carry a note saying so, and if a translated passage reads oddly, the English original is authoritative.

Which AI services are used

These services are used to generate text and speech:

  • Anthropic Claude — writes the text drafts and the translations
  • OpenAI — speaks the narration in flyover films and session videos, and transcribes voice notes you record yourself
  • Microsoft Edge Neural TTS — speaks the synthetic mission radio voices

Which data is sent to these services, and when, is described on the Data Protection page.

Why this page exists

From 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) requires certain AI-generated content to be labelled. Most of what you find here is popular-science astronomy written under human editorial control, which the regulation does not require to be labelled. This page is published anyway, voluntarily: if a machine helped write something you read, you should be able to look that up in one place.

Questions about the use of AI on this site? Please get in touch via the Legal Notice page.