Look around (tilt toward the horizon; away from a black hole)
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Fly to a body or a label
Double-click / C
Re-centre the view
Space
Pause time
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Slower, faster, reverse, now
0–9
Sun, Mercury … Neptune, Pluto
R
Solar System overview
T
Grand Tour (←→ to step)
OLK
Orbits, labels, constellations
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Hide the interface, full screen
What is real here
Sizes, distances and orbits are to scale; positions are computed for the date shown.
With "Today's Earth" switched on (Layers), the globe shows NASA's real daily satellite mosaic for the date on the clock — the actual clouds, weather and sea ice — fading to the cloudless high-resolution base as you zoom to street level.
Every star is a catalogued star at its measured distance.
Satellites are propagated live from current orbital elements (SGP4); spacecraft follow real JPL trajectories.
Nebulae, clusters and nearby galaxies sit at their catalogued positions and distances.
Black holes are ray-traced: light is followed through the curved space of a non-rotating hole, so the lensing, the shadow and the Doppler and gravitational shifts of the glowing gas are computed, not painted. Spin is not modelled. The stars orbiting Sagittarius A* follow their measured orbits.
Disc colours are thermal, compressed into the visible range (real discs peak in ultraviolet or X-rays); the orange of Sagittarius A* and M87* follows the radio images.
The belts, the Oort cloud, the cosmic web, the star fields around distant black holes and their host galaxies are statistical models.
Credits
Planet textures: Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0)
Global mosaics and streaming tiles: NASA Solar System Treks, USGS Astrogeology, NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI, NASA/JPL-Caltech/LPI
Earth base map: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX (modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016)
Orbits & spacecraft trajectories: NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics & Horizons
Live satellite elements: CelesTrak (Dr. T.S. Kelso)
Black holes: stellar orbits from Gillessen et al. 2017 and the GRAVITY Collaboration; masses and orientations from the Event Horizon Telescope, GRAVITY and Gaia (El-Badry et al. 2023)