Show HN: Atlas of Space
116 comments
·January 8, 2025saltminer
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
nico
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 :)
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
javierluraschi
I would love to be able to zoom out beyond solar system and grasp a sense of how far we are from other stars and our place in our galaxy, etc.
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.
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.
dcuthbertson
Stellar work!
I couldn't resist the pun, but all kidding aside this space atlas is truly wonderful.
ripe
Beautiful!
I am currently working on a canvas app (not Three.js, though), so I will look through your code, too.
Thank you for doing such an excellent job.
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!
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.
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!