🖱Drag to orbit the view · Scroll to zoom · Right-drag to pan.
🔭Click any body — planet, moon, or ISS — to focus the camera on it and see a live info card with distances, orbital data, and facts. The camera rides along as it moves.
🛸The ISS is a live 3D model: SGP4-propagated from today's TLE. Its solar arrays track the Sun in real time. Click it for ground track and pass info.
🌙12 major moons are shown when you focus their parent planet — Phobos, Io, Europa, Titan, Triton and more, all with real JPL Horizons orbital data.
🛰Satellites — the ~150 brightest known objects in orbit (Tiangong, rocket bodies…), SGP4-propagated from fresh Celestrak TLEs around Earth.
📡Starlink — the full SpaceX mega-constellation (~10,500 satellites) as a live shell hugging Earth, from current TLEs. The 1/2/3 buttons on the pill switch view: sharp dots (per-plane colours), orbital rings (each plane's orbit drawn), or inclination shells (a few bold colours).
🛰Satellite categories — separate toggles for Navigation (GPS/GNSS, MEO), the Geostationary ring, Comms LEO constellations, Weather & science, and tracked Debris. Altitudes are scaled so LEO, MEO and GEO sit at distinct shells — Earth orbit as a cross-section.
🔭Space telescopes — Hubble, Chandra, XMM-Newton and JWST as 3D models with their real orbits: Hubble's low circle, the wild multi-day ellipses of the X-ray observatories, and JWST riding Sun–Earth L2 with its halo ring. Optics correctly point away from the Sun.
✦Light ping — fire a pulse from the Sun travelling at real light-speed (in sim time); each planet lights up with its light-time as the wavefront passes. True scale — morph to honest sizes & distances and watch everything vanish into the void; a diameter banner appears and you can hover (or tap) any glowing marker — planets or the Sun — to magnify it against Earth. Halley's Comet rides its real retrograde orbit — time-machine to July 2061 for the tail.
🔊Sound — turn on a gentle "music of the spheres": each planet is a soft tone on a shared chord (slower orbits sit lower), panning with its position and swelling as it rounds the Sun, so the harmony drifts as the system turns. Off by default.
☄️Comets — four more periodic comets on their real orbits: Encke (3.3-yr), 67P (ESA's Rosetta target), and the meteor-shower parents Swift–Tuttle (Perseids) and Tempel–Tuttle (Leonids). Each grows an ion tail pointing away from the Sun as it nears perihelion; click any for its story.
🧲Mag fields — dipole field lines with each planet's real tilt (Earth 11°, Uranus a wild 59°). Venus and Mars correctly show none.
🌀Gravity grid — a spacetime sheet under the ecliptic; the Sun digs a deep funnel and every planet dents it, wells riding along as the planets orbit.
🧊Kuiper Belt — the icy debris ring beyond Neptune (~30–50 AU), home of Pluto and the comets. Most bodies cluster in the classical belt at low tilt, with a scattered tail reaching higher inclinations. Drifts slowly prograde at high time speeds and morphs honestly under true scale.
🪨Asteroid belt — the rocky rubble between Mars and Jupiter (~2.1–3.3 AU), with the Kirkwood gaps cleared by Jupiter's resonances visible as dark lanes in the ring. Ceres (dwarf planet) and Vesta ride their real orbits as clickable bodies with info cards.
☀️The ☰ Controls panel (right side) has toggles for orbit paths, labels, the ISS, satellites, moons & rings (calms the blur at high time speeds), magnetic fields, the gravity grid, the Milky Way backdrop, and sliders for sun & Milky Way brightness.
⏸Time bar: ⏮ slower/reverse · ⏸ pause · ⏭ faster · type a date and hit Go to jump there.