Terms of use

1. Who we are

Heliocodex, at heliocodex.com, is run by FALLINGHIPPO LIMITED, which trades as FallingHippo. In these terms “we”, “us” and “our” mean that company, and “the site” means heliocodex.com and every page, file and tool on it, including the 3D view, the sky map and the star pages.

2. About these terms

By using the site you agree to these terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t use it. They apply together with our privacy policy, our cookies and storage page and our licences and credits page, which are part of them.

Please read them. The terms in force when you use the site are the ones that apply to that use, and we can change them (see section 19).

If you use the site on behalf of a school, a company or another organisation, you confirm you have the authority to accept these terms for it.

3. Who can use the site

Anyone can look at the site. If you are under 18, ask a parent, carer or teacher if you are unsure about anything here. If you are under 13, please ask before you email us.

You are responsible for the device and the internet connection you use, and for any charges your provider makes. The 3D view downloads a fair amount of data, so on a mobile connection it is worth checking your allowance first.

4. How you may use the site

You may:

• read, explore and learn from the site for yourself;
• show it to a class or a group, project it, and set your students tasks that use it;
• print or save a page for your own use or for teaching;
• quote short extracts with credit to Heliocodex and a link to the page;
• link to any page, from anywhere (see section 7);
• use the open data files named on the licences and credits page on the terms of their licences.

Anything beyond this, such as publishing our text or pictures elsewhere, needs our written permission. The licences page explains how to ask and what you can reuse without asking.

5. What you must not do

You must not use the site to, or in a way that does, any of the following:

• break the law or help someone else to;
• copy the site or a large part of it, or build a copy or mirror of it, without our written permission;
• collect pages, text or pictures automatically in bulk (scraping, crawling or harvesting), apart from ordinary search engines and the open data files described above;
• use our text, pictures or data to train an artificial intelligence model or build a dataset without our written permission;
• overload the site, or send it more requests than a person could reasonably make by hand;
• try to get into parts of the site, our accounts or our hosting that you aren’t meant to reach, or probe them for weaknesses without our permission (see section 10);
• introduce a virus or other harmful code, or attack the site in any way (see section 14);
• remove or hide the credits, copyright notices or licence statements that go with our content or other people’s;
• suggest that we, NASA, ESA or any other organisation named on the site has endorsed you, your product or your service, or is connected to you;
• sell our content or use it in a product or service you sell.

We may take down links, block access or take other steps if we reasonably think you have broken this section.

6. Our name, logo and content

The site, its design, the written text, the lessons, the glossary, the facts, the drawings, the 3D scenes, the data we have put together and the software that runs it belong to us or to the people who license them to us, and are protected by copyright and other laws in the UK and around the world. The Heliocodex name and logo are ours. All rights are reserved except those given in these terms and on the licences page.

Where we have built on other people’s work, such as NASA’s photographs, open star catalogues and free fonts, it keeps its owners’ rights and licences. Each is credited on the sources and licences pages. We don’t own NASA, ESA, JPL or any other organisation’s names, logos or insignia, and neither do you. Heliocodex is independent. It isn’t run by, approved by or connected to NASA, ESA, JPL, Solar System Scope or any mission named on the site.

7. Linking to the site

You may link to our home page or to any other page, as long as you do so fairly and legally, without damaging our reputation or taking advantage of it. Please don’t link in a way that suggests we endorse you or have a connection with you when we don’t, and don’t put our pages inside a frame on yours or make it look as though our content is yours. We can withdraw this permission at any time.

8. Ideas, corrections and messages

We would like to hear when something is wrong. If you email us a correction, a question or a suggestion, you agree that we may act on it and use it to improve the site without paying you and without crediting you, unless you ask us to credit you and we agree. Please don’t send us anything confidential or anything you wouldn’t want us to use. How we handle the personal details in a message is in the privacy policy.

If you tell us about a mistake we will look at it quickly, and where you are right we will change the page and, where it matters, note what changed.

9. The information on the site

It is for learning. Heliocodex explains the Sun, the planets, moons, stars and galaxies, and shows them in 3D. We take care over every figure, give a source for it and say whether it was measured, worked out or comes from a model. It is a teaching site, not a scientific journal, and science changes. Moon counts, distances, ages and other figures are revised as new measurements come in, and our pages are only as current as the sources we have used.

Some of it is drawn, not photographed. Where a scene, a surface or a figure is a model, an artist’s impression or a computer’s guess, the site says so. The close-up views of surfaces and cloud tops are generated as you watch, and the constellation lines are one convention for joining the dots. Please don’t treat them as photographs or as measurements.

Positions and times are approximate. The positions of the planets in the 3D view come from a published approximation that is good to a fraction of a degree between 1800 and 2050. The sky map is worked out from the place and time on your device, which may be wrong or set to a guess. Use it to learn the sky. Don’t rely on it to time or point an instrument, to navigate, to plan a launch, a journey or an expedition, or for anything where a wrong answer could cause harm. Use a dedicated almanac or professional software for that.

Look after your eyes. Looking at the Sun, with the naked eye for more than a moment or at any time through binoculars, a telescope or a camera without a proper solar filter, can cause permanent blindness. The sky map and the Sun pages show you where the Sun is. They don’t tell you it is safe to look.

It is not advice. Nothing on the site is professional, educational or any other kind of advice for your particular situation.

We don’t promise that any information on the site is accurate, complete or up to date. We will try to correct mistakes when we learn of them.

10. Reporting security problems

If you think you have found a weakness in the site, please tell us at [email protected] before telling anyone else and give us a reasonable time to fix it. If you act in good faith, report what you found, don’t look at or change other people’s data, don’t disrupt the site and don’t ask for payment, we won’t take action against you. We can’t offer rewards. This doesn’t allow you to test the systems of Cloudflare, Google or anyone else we use.

11. Our other websites and other people’s

The site links to other websites, including NASA’s and those of journals, observatories and open data projects, to show where information comes from. We don’t control them, we aren’t responsible for their content, availability or privacy practices, and a link isn’t an endorsement. Some of our own other sites and apps have separate terms.

12. What we are and aren’t promising about the service

We provide the site free of charge, as it is and as available. We don’t promise it will be available all the time, uninterrupted, fast or free of faults. The 3D view needs a recent browser and a device with a graphics chip that supports WebGPU or WebGL 2, and it may run slowly, or not at all, on an older or less powerful device. It has been built to respect your device’s reduced-motion setting, but if you have a medical condition that is affected by moving images, take care with the 3D view.

We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of the site at any time, for example to fix a fault, to correct a mistake, or because we have stopped running it. We aren’t obliged to keep it going, and we won’t be liable to you if we do. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you about big changes on the site.

13. Consumers and the law

The site is free and you buy nothing from it, so no contract for the sale of goods, services or paid digital content is made when you use it. Because of that, the rules on cancelling distance contracts in the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 and the rules on the quality of paid digital content in the Consumer Rights Act 2015 don’t apply to the site. If we ever sell anything on it, we will give you the information and rights the law requires before you buy.

Nothing in these terms takes away any right you have by law that can’t be taken away, whether you live in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.

14. Viruses and security

We don’t guarantee that the site is free from viruses or other harmful code, though we take sensible steps to keep it clean and the only code the site loads from anyone else’s servers is Cloudflare’s visit-counting script, which you can switch off (see the cookies and storage page). You are responsible for protecting your own devices. We aren’t liable for damage caused by a virus or other harmful material that you pick up by using the site or by downloading anything from it, except where the law says we are.

You must not attack the site, for example with a denial-of-service attack or with malicious code. If you do, we may report you to the relevant authorities and give them your details.

15. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that the law doesn’t allow us to limit or exclude.

Subject to that:

• Because the site is free, we aren’t liable for any loss or damage that comes from using it or relying on what is on it, whether the claim is in contract, tort (including negligence), breach of statutory duty or any other way, to the extent the law allows.
• If you use the site for business, we aren’t liable for lost profits, lost sales, lost business, lost data, wasted time or any indirect or consequential loss.
• We aren’t responsible for any loss caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

16. Suspending access

We may stop you using the site, for example by blocking an address, if we reasonably think you have broken these terms or are putting the site or other people at risk. We will usually tell you why if we can, and will lift it when the reason has gone.

17. Your privacy

How we handle personal data is explained in our privacy policy, and what the site stores on your device is in our cookies and storage page. By using the site you accept that those pages describe how we handle your data.

18. Complaints and disputes

If you have a complaint about the site, please tell us first at [email protected]. We will usually reply within 5 working days, and we will try to put right anything that is our fault. If we can’t agree, you may use any other route the law gives you, including the courts. Nothing here stops you contacting a regulator or consumer body. For complaints about personal data, see section 18 of the privacy policy.

19. Which law applies

These terms, and any dispute or claim that comes out of them or the use of the site (including non-contractual disputes), are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you are a consumer, you may bring a claim in the courts of England and Wales or, if you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, in the courts of the part of the United Kingdom where you live. If you are using the site for business, the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction. Different rules may apply to you if you live outside the UK. In that case, mandatory laws in your own country may give you extra rights.

20. Other important terms

• If a part is invalid. If a court or regulator finds part of these terms unlawful or unenforceable, the rest carries on.
• If we don’t enforce a right straight away. That doesn’t mean we’ve given it up.
• Nobody else has rights under these terms. These terms are between you and us. No one else has any right to enforce them under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999.
• Transfer. We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation, for example if we sell the site or our business. This won’t affect your rights.
• The whole deal. These terms, with the pages they refer to, are everything agreed between us about the site.
• Language. These terms are available in English only.
• What this site is not. The site has no accounts, no comments, no messaging or posting between visitors and no search across other websites. It is not a “user-to-user service” or a “search service” for the purposes of the Online Safety Act 2023. If that ever changes, we will update these terms and our privacy policy first.

21. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms from time to time, for example to reflect changes to the site or to the law. When we do, we’ll update this page and change the date at the top. The terms on this page at the time you use the site are the ones that apply. Please check this page from time to time.

• 11 November 2026. First version, written for the launch of the new Heliocodex.

22. Contact us

Questions, problems or requests to use our content: [email protected]. For anything about your personal data: [email protected]. You can also write to FALLINGHIPPO LIMITED, 71-75 Shelton Street, London, England, WC2H 9JQ, our registered office, though email is quicker.