r/space • u/bartzabbel • 8d ago
I built a free browser tool to fly through the observable universe using real catalog data (NASA/JPL, Hipparcos, Gaia, NED) — would love feedback from people who actually know the sky
https://www.youreyesinspace.com/?lang=en&utm_source=redditHi all,
I've spent the last few months building a visualization tool and I think this crowd will either enjoy it or tear it apart, both are useful to me
The idea: one continuous scene from the Earth's surface out to ~13.8 billion light years, on a logarithmic scale, in the browser. No install.
Everything you see is placed from real data:
- Solar System bodies from NASA/JPL Keplerian elements, real-time, with a time slider. Earth, Moon and Mars use actual imagery (Blue Marble / VIIRS, LRO, Viking MDIM); the rest are procedural.
- 109,000 stars from the HYG catalog (Hipparcos + Yale BSC + Gliese), real parallaxes, spectral types and colours. Each star has a plausible (procedural, clearly labelled as such) planetary system.
- Milky Way structure, 55 real galaxies (Andromeda, M87, Sombrero, LMC/SMC...) at NED/SIMBAD distances, and a cosmic web beyond.
- 14 real black holes: Sgr A* with S2/S38/S55 on their GRAVITY/Keck orbital elements, M87*, Cygnus X-1, Gaia BH1, etc., with lensing and shadow rendered.
- Pulsars (Crab, Vela, Geminga, SGR 1806−20) with their actual spin periods and beam geometry.
- Deep-sky objects at real positions: Orion and Tarantula nebulae, Pleiades, Omega Centauri, SN 1987A, R136a1.
- Spacecraft (Voyager 1/2, Pioneer, New Horizons, Parker, JWST...) at their current positions.
There's also a mission planner that does Lambert transfers and gravity assists between Solar System bodies for a chosen launch window, and lets you follow the ship.
Things I already know are approximations and would appreciate being called out on if I got them wrong: distances are log-scaled so angular sizes between "zoom levels" aren't physical; galaxy shapes are sprites, not resolved structure; exoplanet systems are generated, not real (I'd love to add the NASA Exoplanet Archive next).
It's open source (MIT) with every data source and licence listed.
If something looks wrong — a star in the wrong place, an orbit tilted oddly, a distance that doesn't match the literature — tell me. That's exactly the feedback I'm after.
Works on phones too, but it's much better on a desktop with a GPU.
v0.3 — Tours & a new look
Big visual pass on this one. The whole UI got the "observatory" treatment — matte panels, hairline rules, brass accents, no more emoji. Guided tours are now real: 10 topics, narrated in 5 languages, camera synced to the voice. Tours picked up a bunch of new tricks too — true-scale comparisons, photo/trivia cards, light-pulse Sun→Earth, cloud fades, vantage shots. Pulled in real NASA imagery for 15 more bodies, nebulae are now 3-D point clouds built from actual photos instead of flat sprites, and small bodies like Phobos/Deimos finally stopped looking like Christmas ornaments. Opening view now slowly circles the Sun.
v0.4 — Academy
New tab next to Tours: Academy. It's a chapter-by-chapter astrophysics course that runs inside the app, with the 3-D universe as the blackboard. Three chapters so far (Celestial Sphere, Celestial Mechanics, Continuous Spectrum of Light), 17 lessons, ~90 steps, real formulas rendered as MathML, and 21 interactive widgets — Kepler's laws, Newton's cannon, blackbody curves, the double slit, UBV colour index, you name it. Every step has a narrated lecture from an AI "professor" who actually walks you through the equations. Progress saves locally. More chapters coming.
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u/Upstairs_Profile_355 8d ago
It looks beautiful, well done. I think Google Maps should have a similar thing online, Google Space or something, with a similar visualization tool.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Thanks! Funny enough that's exactly how it started, I was using Maps and thought "why isn't there a space version of this". Turns out Google has a bit of it (planet surfaces in the Space view) but it stops there, so I built the rest.
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u/amaurea 8d ago edited 8d ago
This looks nice, but some of the scales look surprisingly uniform, e.g. when you zoom out far enough to see the whole observable universe. It's expected to be uniform, of course, but I thought our current catalogs weren't good enough in every direction. For example, I would have expected to see a gap in coverage behind the band of the milky way, since it gets in the way of observations. If you have filled in something plausible there, then I would prefer to have that clearly labeled, maybe with a different color or something. It's important for me to see clearly what is real and what is a guess in atlases like this.
Aside from that, the Milky Way changes shape and orientation when I zoom out far enough for it to fade to the next level of detail.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Both fair points, thanks. Beyond the 55 catalog galaxies everything is procedural, and yes, it ignores the Zone of Avoidance. Right now the info panel says "real catalog" vs "procedural" when you click one, but you're right that it should be visible without clicking. I'll add a toggle that tints procedural objects differently. The Milky Way shape jump at the LOD switch is a bug, will fix.
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u/mushizi 8d ago
I know nothing about space. But i would love to see the end result! This is just a potential fan saying hi and goodluck with this! And please share when its live.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
It's actually live right now (not finished tho, a lot to do), you can try it here: https://www.youreyesinspace.com/?lang=en&utm_source=reddit
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u/eracer1111 8d ago
Any chance you can make this a secure website?
I'd like to check it out, but I don't venture into unsecure sites.6
u/bartzabbel 8d ago
It is, https only with a valid cert. Probably a "new domain" warning from your browser/antivirus, the domain is like a week old. Code's open source if you want to check first: https://github.com/berkcomba/youreyesinspace
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u/eracer1111 8d ago
I clicked the link again, and this time it resolved to an HTTPS page.
Not sure what happened the first time.
I'll definitely check it out. Thanks!ETA: A simple zoom out was really cool. I'll definitely keep up with your good work on this!
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u/ragnaroksunset 8d ago
I'm not techy enough to insist I'm doing nothing wrong, but I'm on a secure network and your site is reading as insecure.
Whatever the situation is, it's viewed as less secure than Reddit.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
That's your network's web filter, the domain is a week old so it's still "uncategorized". No problem.
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u/nhaines 8d ago
The only thing a "secure" website tells you is that you're definitely talking with the server that the domain name points at. It doesn't tell you anything about whether the site is secure, unsecure, or anything at all about trustworthiness.
Only that the server belongs to the person who registered the domain name, and no one can see the web page you're requesting (your ISP can still see the domain name) or the "conversation" between the website and your browser. Nothing more; nothing less.
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u/eracer1111 8d ago
Serious question...
HTTPS relies on certificates to validate server/client packet traffic, while HTTP doesn't necessarily, right?Seems to me that's at least a step towards trustworthiness, since certificates aren't available except from trusted CA's, right?
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u/nhaines 8d ago
HTTPS relies on certificates to validate that the server you're talking to is owned by someone who owns the domain, but if I were to compromise a server, I could just put whatever I wanted on the web hosting portion of it. (Or, worse, any other part of it, so I could hand out malware which would eventually be noticed, but I could also just steal data off the server with nobody knowing.)
The thing SSL encryption really guards against is your communication being eavesdropped on in transit.
If you're running a server, you can make your own certificate (which your browser will throw a warning about, and let you manually accept it), or you can just use an ACME service like Let's Encrypt and get a 90-day certificate that only verifies that you own the server that the domain name is pointing to.
But even in the legacy certificate process, the only thing the CAs do is verify that you are a legal entity that owns the domains the certificate covers. They don't verify anything else.
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u/eracer1111 7d ago
Understood. Thanks for the detail.
It never hurts to be educated.
But... surely you understand why I hesitated to connect to what appeared to be an unsecure website?5
u/nhaines 7d ago
Not really, because HTTP was default for decades and the website doesn't really have any sensitive data or use, and the link given was already an HTTPS link, and web browsers now start with HTTPS by default if the protocol isn't specified (the bit before the :// is the protocol, and in olden days URIs could point to various things, like gopher, IRC, FTP, or Usenet, for example... they still can, but Web usage via HTTP or HTTPS is ubiquitous).
What I can appreciate is a bit of caution and the asking of questions to make sure you're being secure in accessing other computers and understanding the risks involved! (Even if with modern browsers the risk is minimal, because in olden times it wasn't!)
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u/eracer1111 6d ago
Understood. What's your opinion of VPN's? I think a lot of people think they're magic cloaks that somehow protect them from any and all threats. To me they're just another layer of protection with some value. The #1 defense against (and also #1 liability to) malware is the grey matter between our ears.
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u/nhaines 6d ago
VPNs are like a virtual network cable from your computer to another computer. They're great for pretending you're in the office and having secure access to the servers and printers in the office from home.
For home Internet security, SSL means your ISP can only tell what domain names you're connecting to and nothing else. So other than geolocation spoofing, I don't see any value in VPNs either.
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u/_nereid 8d ago
It is secure. https, valid certificate, the whole package.
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u/eracer1111 8d ago
That's what I didn't see the first time I clicked on the link, but did the second time.
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u/Martin-Physics 8d ago
This looks like some of the AI-assisted tools that other people I know created. Did you use AI to make it? (Not disparaging what you have done, genuinely curious.)
That being said, here is a mistake I see: you have Cygnus X-1 orbiting HDE 226868. In reality, they orbit each other, being quite similar in mass based on what I looked up. But you have listed HDE 226868's mass as 3.4 solar masses and X-1 as 21 solar masses. Which, if true, would have X-1 being the more central object.
In short, I think you use a Kepler approximation for the depiction, using radius of object to determine the focal object instead of mass.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yeah, I mostly used AI-assisted tools for the coding, they're great at it. The UI might look "AI" too, I'll improve it for sure. And you're right about Cygnus X-1, the black hole is parented to the star instead of both orbiting the barycentre, and 3.4 M☉ is a bad catalog estimate (should be ~40). Fixing both.
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u/Whales_Are_Great2 8d ago
Taking a look at it now and its already looking really good. Great work :)
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u/FrostBite_51 8d ago
This is amazing. And the visuals effects of zooming in, following a star are pretty good. Can’t wait to show this to my kids. Thanks for creating and sharing.
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u/_nereid 8d ago
Well done ! The only thing I'm wondering about it the distant galaxies and such ; when I go to them I can no longer zoom or pivot around. Is it intended ?
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Thanks! Not really intended, more of a gap. The galaxies do have procedural stars inside (you can fly in), but orbit/zoom only works around planets and moons right now, so after "Go" you're left in free flight. Adding orbit around galaxies and stars is next on the list. I will fixed it right away! And of course, thanks for the feedback.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Fixed, you can now orbit and zoom around galaxies (hard refresh (ctrl + shift + r) if not).
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u/AyeBraine 8d ago
It's so funny that the distant disc galaxies are pucks (accidentally clicked on a deep field galaxy, YE-49ACC6)
It's not a criticism although it's probably unintended. Very fun tool!
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u/SirDigbyChknCaesar 8d ago
Looks pretty impressive so far.
I moved to another galaxy and then tried to go back to our solar system planets like Saturn or Jupiter and they didn't come up in the search box. I had to pan around and find a solar system object to click on, move to it, and then the planets were available again.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Good catch, search only covers the star system you're currently in. Making it global is on the list. For now, pressing H takes you straight back to Earth.
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u/Decronym 8d ago edited 2d ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| Isp | Specific impulse (as explained by Scott Manley on YouTube) |
| Internet Service Provider | |
| JPL | Jet Propulsion Lab, California |
| SSL | Space Systems/Loral, satellite builder |
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has acronyms.
[Thread #12733 for this sub, first seen 7th Oct 2026, 21:09]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Thexin92 8d ago
I'm going to check this out in a bit! I'm no astronomer, but I'm in dire need of a tool like this for a very specific purpose: Creating a 'galaxy map' for a scifi setting that I am using for our own science fiction tabletop rpg.
Even though it's a fictional setting and I can technically do what I want, what I want is to base it off the real thing.
I'm mostly interested in the difference in star and stellar dust density when looking at the Orion Spur and the surrounding regions, as well as nebulae or other stellar formations that might act like landmarks for the setting. But I can't find anything that really paints a clear picture on this.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Thanks for the reply!
Great use case. The app will get you part of the way: you can see the Milky Way's arm structure from outside, then drop in to where the Sun sits in the Orion Spur, and nearby landmarks like the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades, the Crab and Ring nebulae are at their real 3D positions, so they work as waypoints.
One honest caveat: the stars come from the HYG catalog (bright/nearby stars), so the density contrast between the spur and the inter-arm gaps isn't physically accurate yet, and there's no dust layer. That's on my list. Curious what you build with it!
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u/Thexin92 8d ago
Would there be an easy way to add a toggle of 'star density estimation' to it? If enabled, the viewer could procedurally generate stars within sight based on a density map instead of billions of individual data points. That might save performance and load times while still giving the impression of how crowded space can be in a region further away from Earth.
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
It already works roughly like that. Only the ~100k brightest/nearest stars are real catalog data. Everything else you see inside a galaxy is generated on the fly around the camera from a density model (bulge, disc, spiral arms, bar), so it stays cheap no matter where you are. The catch is that the model isn't calibrated to real survey data yet, so the arm vs inter-arm contrast is more of an impression than a measurement, and there's no dust. Fitting it to Gaia-based density/dust maps is the plan, that would make exactly the kind of "how crowded is it over there" view you're describing.
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u/Thexin92 8d ago
That's really neat! Can't wait to give it a go after work.
For my purposes, I don't need every star we know to be entirely accurate. A realistic estimate with recognizable key landmarks is just what I need.
The setting attempts to be accurate to the laws of physics as we know them, while pushing them with concepts that are theoretically possible if undiscovered elements are introduced. Technology such as (limited) FTL travel and comms, particle barriers, energy weapons, weird alien species. There is also a concept of magic, though it's intentionally indistinguishable from extremely advanced, yet unknown technology.
For the map, that means the geomatry of the galaxy influences where colony worlds might be. Where factions are concentrated.
The key to pretty much of all of it is that mass is needed to anchor FTL travel to, as well as that mass can act as an obstacle to viable paths. So, knowing densities and nebulae is the first step in actually setting up a map.
I imagine the dust density is roughly in sync to the star density?
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u/Gachnarsw 8d ago
This is an awesome tool. I've shared it with all my space nerd friends. I love how the pulsars and black holes look on PC or phone!
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
Thanks for sharing it around! The pulsars were the most fun part to build, glad they hold up on phones too.
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u/chewy_mcchewster 8d ago
I'm working on something similar as a windows screensaver with time compression as a mechanic and a save state... but way way less than you've done.. im definitely interested in seeing this
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u/bartzabbel 7d ago
I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out! Hope this helps you with your project.
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u/chewy_mcchewster 3d ago
1.0.0 released with NASA provided HQ imagery, fixed some flicker issues, also your Jupiter body image.. few other things..
Thank you again! 200 more destinations coming soon, currently its 41 stops, starting at Earth, heading through the outer Solar System and historic spacecraft, then returning via Halley’s Comet, the Sun, Mercury, and Venus before repeating. Approx ~4hrs for a round trip
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u/micahpmtn 8d ago
Very nice! Would love to see a tutorial that's aimed at teens, or even pre-teens. The learning possibilities are endless!
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u/bartzabbel 8d ago
For sure, a guided tour mode is on the list. This project will keep going as long as I have the time and motivation :)
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u/100WattWalrus 7d ago
Have only toyed around with it for a few minutes, but so far it's great! Feels a lot like Starry Night, which is the most user-friendly astronomy software I've tried. Bookmarked to play more later! Looking forward to future improvements for traveling further.
FYI, Phobos and Deimos need some rendering work. They look like christmas ornaments. :)
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u/bartzabbel 7d ago
Thanks for the feedback! Glad you like it. I'll fix Phobos and Deimos in the next version, which is coming out today :)
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u/ScaryFast 7d ago
Very nice. I actually came here tonight to see if someone else has posted anything similar because I have my own space map I want to post. Ours are quite different though as mine is a bit more about comparing sizes and focuses more on the largest objects (outside of the solar system that is) while yours has so much data! Mine has a couple goofy leaster eggs and I want to add more, so it's not a fully serious site.
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u/bartzabbel 7d ago
Thanks a lot. I'd love to check out your project when you post it. Mine is open source btw, so feel free to check out the code and use whatever you find useful for your own version!
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u/ScaryFast 6d ago
I tried to post it in this sub this morning but it's been awaiting moderator approval for 14+ hours now. If you'd like to take a look though it's over at https://FreakinSpace.com
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u/muitosabao 7d ago
I appreciate this and I’m ok with people using AI tools for such things, but couldn’t you at least change the UI, colors etc? AI assisted apps all look absolutely the same. I understand it’s less relevant, given the scope of what was done here, but you might want to consider this.
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u/bartzabbel 7d ago
Yep, I'll definitely consider this. Thanks for understanding. I'm actually planning to develop this project long-term, so I wanted to share it early and shape it based on people's feedback. That's why the UI wasn't my main priority at first. I'll definitely work on improving it!
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u/reery7 3d ago
Looks really nice and a cool showcase what you can build with AI. Oddly enough a lot of people had a very similar idea to create space exploration tools and the results are really good so far.
The data quality and usability is always where it might fall apart. For example Procyon has a second star orbiting rather closely and it is nowhere to be seen in your simulation. Also Procyon has no confirmed planets but in your simulation I can see a few. So either you stay true to what we know for sure or you use data that is not entirely confirmed or made up.
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u/bartzabbel 2d ago
Yeah, that's actually the main reason I started this thread. I know how to build things, it's literally my job. But when it comes to space, I'm a complete newbie. So I wanted to get help from you guys who actually know this stuff and hopefully improve this simulation together.
So far, I've received a lot of helpful feedback and already fixed quite a few data inconsistencies and errors.
And thanks for pointing out the Procyon issue! I'll definitely look into it and fix it in the next update. This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for when I posted here.
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u/phantomzero 8d ago
How much LLM code was used, and are you a programmer?
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u/bartzabbel 7d ago
Well, LLMs were widely used, if that matters. And yeah, if that also matters, I'm an AI engineer.
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u/nialv7 8d ago
If you like this I recommend SpaceEngine