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  • Beautiful site. I love how tranquil the scene becomes when satellites and spacecraft is unchecked. Thanks for that SpaceX (and others).
    by karim79
  • Celestia did all of this and more. 10+ years ago.

    https://celestiaproject.space/

    by tintor
  • Just spent a little time following Europa Clipper, it will fly by Earth very soon! If you zoom out from Earth, it's already pretty close. This will be its second gravity assist after Mars. Very cool site!
    by climech
  • Fun: 116 d/s with Earth/etc selected, gives a Sun "orbiting" the Earth/etc effect.

    Bug: ISO DEB at 17 min/s looked normal, but at 2.8 h/s it became a solid-ish (lots of crossing lines) red ellipsoid on the opposite side of the Earth. Upon returning to 17 min/s, it snapped back, after some delay. Current-ish Chromium on linux/X11.

    Feat: Pressing ESC deselects.

    Feat: Perhaps spacebar could pause/unpause time? To avoid fiddly "note current time ratio by counting arrows or hovering, then click pause. Afterward, click the right place to restore time ratio".

    UX: Would you believe I wrote a Feat for 'add a "Now" button to date popup', not "seeing" the current button? Hmm, perhaps move it between date and time ratio?

    UX: Just now for me, upon page load, nothing is moving and the Earth seems a black ball (night over Africa, with night lights obscured by satellite dots). So I could spend several minutes exploring, without being both close enough and oriented to notice there's a texture map. Perhaps start positioned over the terminator (interestingly pretty) and with scaled time (interestingly moving; demos motion; draws attention to time zoom. Maybe 17 min/s?).

    Issue: The planets maps are true-ish color, modulo intensity and shadow. The Sun is... not. Given that "the Sun is some color other than white" is so pervasive a misconception, reinforcing it seems... sigh. Can I interest you in a white field with a few pretty sunspots? Perhaps with limb darkening and tint?

    by mncharity
  • Thank you, this is terrifying.
    by noosphr
  • Author here. It's a browser view of the Solar System at real scale, with its current state, plus the objects around Earth from the CelesTrak catalog.

    Data: CelesTrak TLEs (SGP4), asteroids and comets from JPL SBDB, spacecraft positions from JPL Horizons. Updated daily.

    Rendering is WebGL2, orbit propagation runs in web workers. The asteroid set (~30 MB) loads in the background.

    The time slider runs forwards and backwards; satellites appear and disappear by launch date.

    by wanick
  • Turning on asteroids is a jump scare
    by subtlesoftware

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