Show HN: Atlas of Space
128 comments
·January 8, 2025nico
This is incredibly well done. Thank you!
Love that it works so seamlessly on mobile. I clicked on it expecting it to be almost impossible to use
Instead, I was able to easily navigate everything without getting lost
Also, the speeding up/down controls are excellent, very useful
guigui
Well done! I could spend a long time on this.
One minor suggestion: you should make the labels clickable instead of just the planets/stars. I found it difficult to click on a tiny pixel on screen.
derbOac
... also the orbits themselves ideally? Maybe I missed it but in looking at some of the larger orbits it was hard to zoom in and out to figure out what orbit went with what. It would have been nice to more easily click on the orbit.
I really like it though.
fuzzythinker
Seconded. Also, please make the non-planet labels brighter. The contrast isn't good enough to read it.
aaroninsf
After 90s of playing I came back to add the same comment :)
Maultasche
This is very nice. I didn't know Pluto's orbit was more inclined than many of the others.
It also gives me strong "The Expanse" vibes. Probably because there are so many orbital bodies shown that were mentioned in those books. I also learned that Pallas is an actual asteroid.
pieix
Appreciate the comment! The Expanse and Paul McAuley's Quiet War series both get a lot of inspiration credit for this project. I tried to include every body that has some "brand recognition", whether from fiction or from real spacecraft missions. There are actually quite a few asteroids and comets that have been visited in real life — NASA, ESA, and JAXA have been doing amazing things in the Asteroid Belt over the past few decades.
9dev
Seconded, the whole design seems like something straight out of the books. And it also feels like it's just waiting for other solar systems to be included there…
thinky_thoughts
Where is the ring gate?
getwiththeprog
A 'fictional' toggle, with items and locations from movies and TV would be cool.
ezascanbe
Wonderful! I showed my kids (9 and 10) and we really enjoyed zooming in and out, reading about different Celistial bodie. We were all really intrigued about the "Trans-Neptuinan Objects" and the strange orbits.
We spent a whole 30 minutes afterwards talking about the existence of aliens and how long it would take to reach Alpha Centauri at our current level of technology versus light speed, and the further unpacking faster than light travel depicted in science fiction.
Thank you!
pieix
Thank you for sharing this with your family and for maybe increasing the number of space nerds on this planet! Exactly what I was hoping for with this project.
martyvis
It doesn't seem it is showing the tilt for Earth correct. When I zoom in for around now, the North Pole is in full sun rather than mid Winter. (I'm in Australia so I don't know if it is somehow using my local timezone wrongly)
pieix
Hey, thanks for flagging this. I had the sign flipped for Earth's axial tilt. Fixed now!
santiagobasulto
The project is amazing, thanks and congrats.
A bit of an off-topic comment, I can't cease to be amazed by the quality of HTML apps we can build these days. I remember the days when rendering too many rows on a table could completely break the browser.
pieix
Thank you and not off topic at all, I was thinking this the whole time I was working on this project. The modern browser is magic.
saltminer
This is incredible. I've also struggled to comprehend the scale of distance and time in space due to the sheer magnitudes involved, but this really puts it into perspective.
Some suggestions:
- Better documentation/help menu. (What is ∆t relative to? Some internal clock tick? Also, you should link the source code in the menu.)
- Arbitrary time adjustments so I could click on the date and set a custom date to view any point in the past or future
- The ability to see more than just the solar system
dr_dshiv
I love this.
It’s really easy to get lost in Space when you zoom out and back in after twisting. I can see the planets on the edge of the screen, but can never seem to find them again.
Reloading, of course, fixes all. But maybe some compass to click on to recenter on yourself (earth) like on google maps.
araes
Not surprisingly, this is actually one of the main issues with space travel and sending probes almost anywhere. Get slightly misasligned and you have take sightings on star patterns to try to somehow figure out where you are and what your orientation is. Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, and New Horizons all had / have variations on those systems.
Spacecraft Attitude Determination, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_attitude_determinat...
Star Tracker, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_tracker
verzali
I've had colleagues working on a pulsar navigation system to improve on star sightings.
The idea is to look for the X-ray signals coming from pulsars and then use the frequency of the pulse to identify the pulsar and then match that to a known map to figure out where you are. It's pretty cool and theoretically can work even for interstellar spaceflight.
dr_dshiv
Not to mention the astroinertial guidance system on ICBM nuclear missiles.
To wit, there are 12 Ohio class submarines each with 20 trident missiles each carrying 12 maneuverable nuclear warheads (475 kilotons each).
The missiles are launched under water, reach Mach 18 in 2 minutes, and don’t need GPS — they use the stars to deliver their payload.
I saw a test missile launch once before. It still terrifies me.
divbzero
Along the bottom toolbar there’s a “Reset” button (circular icon with an arrow) that recenters the UI.
divbzero
I love that you’re depicting the Solar System accurately and to scale. It’s always bothered me that planetary orbits are often shown as equally-spaced concentric circles.
The Voyager missions could be interesting to include as you consider adding to your atlas.
theoreticalmal
This puts into perfect perspective why, soon after sunset this time of year. Venus is low to the west, Mars is slightly higher but in the East, and Jupiter is nearly directly overhead
andystanton
Love it, thank you for sharing. Can't wait to show my kids later!
Are the background stars randomly generated or do they correspond to the actual galaxy? Distant points of reference would be interesting to see.
pieix
Thank you! The background stars are a texture that I found on solarsystemscope.com, and _should_ correspond to the actual orientation of the firmament WRT your frame of reference. I'd love to add labels for salient stars.
pedrogpimenta
Excellent project! I want my kids to grow up so we can explore this together :)
I'd love a "real-time" clock but I don't even know if that's feasible!
3D30497420
Second a real-time view. My wife has gotten into planet/stargazing and it would be very cool to see in real-time where, say, Venus is, while also seeing it in the night sky.
Also potentially very cool: This as a real-time screensaver. I'd pay for that!
pieix
Thanks for the feature request, guys — I just shipped a realtime clock with the ability to go backwards through time :)
3D30497420
Very cool!
Hello HN! Sharing a recent side project of mine, the Atlas of Space, that I built out to explore the Solar System.
As a long-time space nerd, I realized recently that I didn't have a good intuition on the scale, speed, and relative orientation of the celestial bodies around us. So over the break I built out a kind of spatial Wikipedia to click around and learn about planets, moons, asteroids, and other bodies orbiting the Sun.
The physics is all simulated in the browser using simple Newtonian mechanics. There's a lot left to do from here, including modeling objects in non-Keplerian orbits and replaying different spacecraft missions.
Hope you have fun clicking around, and curious to hear what I should improve next!