Sponsor This Site

Every tool here is free, and I would like to keep it that way — for students, for teachers, and for anyone who opens a page wanting to know where the sun is right now. I'm looking for a sponsor, or a grant, to pay for the work — ideally one organisation covering the whole site for a year at a time. Here is exactly what that would buy, and — more importantly — what it would not.

What you would be supporting

A free, independent science site built to be used in classrooms and by anyone curious: simulators you can drag through a day, a month or a century, and the numbers that go with them for your own town.

ScaleMore than 4,000 pages, including sunrise, sunset and moon data for over 1,100 towns and cities, tide predictions for 165 US coastal stations, and every time zone in the world.

SubjectGravity, motion, time and space, treated as one set of rules — the day/night map, the Sun–Earth–Moon simulator, the solar system on its real orbits, why orbits don't fall in, and the clocks that measure all of it.

MethodEvery figure is computed in the browser from published orbital elements and real measurements — never typed in, never guessed. Where a picture is not to scale, the page prints the factor by which it is wrong.

AudienceTeachers, students, homeschoolers, libraries, museums, and a large number of people who just wanted to know when the sun sets. Current traffic figures are available on request.

Cost to useNothing, for anyone, with no account and no sign-up. That is the part sponsorship is meant to protect.

What a sponsor gets

A clear credit for the year, in a defined place — across the site, or on the section you support, and on this page. Plain words: "supported by", not a banner.
Your name on something specific. The strongest version of this is funding a tool: a simulator, a data set, a set of lesson plans. You are named on the thing itself — alongside the class whose idea it was, if it came from one — and if you want that credit to outlast the sponsorship year, that is a fair thing to agree in writing at the start.
A page about you, if you want it: who you are, what you do, and why it belongs next to this. Written honestly, and linked from what you funded.
An annual account of what the money built — pages made, tools shipped, classes helped, and what the traffic actually did. Published, so you can point at it, and it stays in the record afterwards.
Association with something genuinely clean. No advertising, no tracking, no student data, nothing sold to children. That is not a common thing to be able to say about a site children use, and it is worth something to be the organisation that kept it that way.

How it would work

A year at a timeTwelve months, then both of us look at it again with the year's real numbers in front of us — what the traffic actually was, and what the money actually built. Renewing is easy and expected; renewing automatically, or forever, is not something I'm going to promise you or ask you to promise me.

Priced against what it was worthNo rate card. We agree a figure for the year from the audience the site actually has, and you see those numbers — before you commit, and again at the end.

One sponsor for the whole site, preferablyThat is the arrangement I'd rather have: a single name, sitewide, for the year. It reads better to a visitor than a patchwork, it is one relationship instead of five, and it means your support is the reason the whole thing stayed free rather than one corner of it.

Or one section, where the fit is obviousIf your work belongs beside a particular part — the tide pages, the solar system, the sun and moon pages, the classroom guide — you can support that instead, and the credit lives there rather than everywhere. Several sponsors can coexist that way, each on the part that suits them.

Credits run with the termWhen a term ends the credit comes down, unless we've agreed otherwise. What stays is the record: the year's published account of what your money built keeps your name on it, because that is a fact rather than an advertisement.

Longer, if it suits us bothA multi-year arrangement, or a tool funded outright with a lasting build credit, is a conversation worth having once we've each seen what the first year does.

What a sponsor cannot buy

This list is the reason the first list is worth anything. It is not negotiable, and it is published here so that anyone can hold both of us to it.

What a page saysNot a number, not a conclusion, not an explanation, not a recommendation. Every figure on this site is computed and checkable by anyone — which is exactly what makes this a testable promise rather than a slogan.

Editorial placementNo sponsored content, no advertorial, no product woven into a lesson. A credit is a credit, and it looks like one.

Anything about a studentNo student data exists here to sell, share or analyse. No names, no emails, no accounts, no class rosters, no student-level analytics — and that does not change for money.

A tracking pixelNo third-party scripts, no ad tags, no retargeting, no data brokers, and nothing that profiles a child. See the technical terms below; they are part of the deal, not a preference.

Exclusivity over the subjectA sponsor supports the work; it does not get to decide what the site covers next, or which other organisations may support it.

The technical terms, which are the point

A sponsorship here cannot slow the site down or compromise a visitor, because of how it is implemented:

A credit is static HTML, built into the page at build time. No script runs, nothing is fetched, and the page weighs the same as it did.
No third-party JavaScript, ever — no ad network, no tag manager, no pixel, no "just this one snippet". Google Analytics is the single third party on the site and it is named in the privacy policy.
A logo, if any, is an inlined SVG served from this domain. Nothing loads from a sponsor's servers, so a sponsor's own analytics never sees a visitor here.
Pages stay static and fast. The whole site is prebuilt and served from a content network, with every calculation done in the visitor's browser. That is what makes it work on a school Chromebook over school wifi, and it is not being traded away.

Who tends to fit

The best fit is an organisation whose own work already belongs beside this: it makes the credit make sense to a reader instead of looking bought. Typically that is —

Astronomy & opticsTelescope, binocular and imaging makers, and the retailers who serve first-time observers.

Science kits & classroom supplyCompanies whose customers are the teachers and parents already reading these pages.

Lab and measurement technologyProbeware, sensors and timing equipment — measuring things is half of what this site is about.

Planetariums, science museums & societiesOften a partnership rather than a cheque: reach, expertise and review in exchange for a tool their visitors can take home.

Space-sector education and outreach programmesOrganisations with a remit to get children into science, looking for something free, national and actually used in classrooms.

Foundations and public science fundersGrants for free, open, informal science education. See the note on nonprofit partners below.

Districts, schools and universitiesFund the tool your own classes need. It gets built for them, and every other class gets it free.

If you don't see yourself on that list but you think the fit is there, say so anyway — it is a description of the obvious cases, not a rule.

Grants, and working with a nonprofit

Much of the money in this field — public science funders, corporate foundations, most education outreach programmes — can only go to a nonprofit or an educational institution. This site is not one. I am open to working through a fiscal sponsor, a partner nonprofit, a museum, a district or a university, either as a subawardee or by having the funds and the accountability sit with the partner.

If you run a programme like that and this looks like something you would want to fund but can't fund directly, tell me — the structure is a solvable problem, and I would rather solve it than let it stop the work.

Talk to me

Send a note through the contact form — say who you are, what you'd want your support to go to, and any constraint on your side (a fiscal year, a nonprofit requirement, a review process). I'll reply, including when the answer is that the fit isn't there.

Worth reading first: why this site exists and the standard it holds itself to on how it is paid for, which this page is the practical half of. If you are a teacher rather than a funder, the thing I want from you is different and better — work with us.

— Lars Estrem

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