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.

Brilliant project and very well done.

That aside, it is just astounding that even a moderate laptop just plows through this as thought it is nothing.

I remember doing orbital calculations on a 486DX with about 30 objects at just barely 30fps thanks to the FPU. That was pretty good for me. Without the FPU you would get maybe 2FPS. Now, you can just throw a half million around at 60fps+ in a web browser. Crazy!

I did some star gazing at an official "dark place" and was really amazed at just how much constant motion you can see from satellites flying around

Beautiful site. I love how tranquil the scene becomes when satellites and spacecraft is unchecked. Thanks for that SpaceX (and others).

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!

Celestia did all of this and more. 10+ years ago.

https://celestiaproject.space/

As of September 29, 2026, there are 16,613 active satellites in Earth orbit, 11,128 of them Starlink.

A fun fact: Kessler syndrome is a runaway chain reaction in orbit. Collisions create debris, and that debris causes more collisions, and when something breaks into pieces, its mass stays the same but its total surface area goes up, and reflected sunlight scales with area.

I submit to you that our kids' kids won't be able to see the milky way galaxy because of this litter.

As a "this is also in current events" ( Successful Earth flyby improves Juice’s course to Jupiter - https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/... )

Doing a search for JUICE as a spacecraft pulls that one up and shows its impressive pre-Jupiter orbital mechanics.

I had no idea that we there are SO many aesteroids that we keeping track of. How are we even doing that? How do we recognize one aesteroid from another?

this is awesome! website is extremely fast and responsive, well done.

crazy to think how much technology is orbiting around the planet and not bumping into each other.

question - is James Webb intentionally making a heart shaped orbit? :)

https://imgur.com/a/kHkGLBa

Always wanted to see the asteroid belt's true density visualized; this really puts it into perspective. Impressive work keeping everything performant.

This is awesome! Thank you for building this.

I could find 3I/ATLAS using the search box for "ATLAS".

Would it be possible to also have the search for "interstellar" list objects classified as interstellar object?

Added an endless ambient mode with generated music: flybys, eclipses, missions, time-lapses. The ∞ button at the top, F for full screen.

Very cool.

I'm curious why is there a ring around earth - is that kind of a default position that a bunch of them automatically get given if there isn't more specificity in the data?

This puts it in perspective how much of satellites is just Starlink.

How come the James Webb telescopes orbit looks like a taco?

It would be nice to have a fun feature where we could vote for the most coolest asteroid. In a bracket way so we can see actual fandom battles.

Silly? Definitely, but who said the internet needs to be only ad-feeds-related stuff.

Anyway, nice work mate!

This is amazing. Well done. How long did it take to make?

A good showcase how easy it is now for LLMs to build these visualizations when the data is structured and available publicly - with the structured and publicly available parts being the main gatekeepers.

Thanks for the great work!

Tracking ISS orbit combined with live feed [0] is amazing.

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO9e9jnhYK8

Turning on asteroids is a jump scare

This is beautiful — handling 526k asteroids in real-time is insane. Is this Canvas or WebGL under the hood?

526k objects and it still feels smooth. are you culling by distance or doing something smarter on the gpu side?

I love this; also runs surprisingly smoothly (at least in browser; didn't check mobile). Also beautiful and hypnotic in motion. What's the next step that you want to take to develop it (not that there needs to be one)?

Tangential, how do you identify what is a satellite in the night sky? They're not shown on Sky Map, the app I use.

This is great! Seeing it like this brings it home, space is getting congested, and Starlink rules.

Almost 1 in 3 tracked spacecraft is Starlink, is that accurate?

There are way more asteroids near the Earth than I thought.

Amazing! I had no idea there were so many satellites, especially Starlink ones.

Wow, speedy and convenient! Well done!

Some insights:

* There is sooo much space debris! Dead sattelites and rocket bodies

* Starlink put up a hell of lot of satellites, too.

* There is a pretty dense sphere of items around the earth at geo-stationary orbit, a bit like a mantle; but most of all in a circle on that sphere.

Real scale makes asteroids hard to see without magnification.

What's with those giant blobs of asteroids offset in jupiter's orbit by like 60deg on either side?

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?

Quite incredible how much manmade crap there is up there, and much of it probably useless, and a potential problem for the satellites which are of actual use.

I hate to be the one to come here with a feature request but can you guys hurry up with the Universe already?

Super! Not easy to select or center on a planet though.

I love how smooth it is! Amazing work

No github repo? :(

Thank you, this is terrifying.

thatssss impressive af

its really good, appreciate it

Very interesting!

this thing is so cool

OP is there a "keep current" affordance which updates constantly to show real-time positions?

I assumed the "play" button would do this; what I see is it pulsing with 1s/s and || indicated which I guessed meant "this is now PAUSE; and, update is one fps"...

...but even selecting e.g. a Starlink sat I do not see any motion.

Hug of death, or, misunderstanding of feature?

Oh man, it seems like my asteroid (Minor Planet 31689 - Sebmellen [0]) is missing.

[0]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6711174

[1]: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=20031...

great project!!!!