Stellar Atlas

Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom, click any light to learn what it is. Press / to search.

Stellar Atlas

A map of our corner of the universe at every scale, from the whole Milky Way down to a single moon, drawn from real astronomical catalogs.

Moving around

Drag: Orbit around the centre of view
Right-drag, two fingers: Pan
Scroll, pinch: Zoom. Keep zooming into the Sun or an exoplanet host to enter its system
Click, tap: Select and fly to an object
Double-click: Fly closer
W A S D, R F: Fly; hold Shift to go faster
/: Search
T: Follow the selected object
G: Back to the whole galaxy
Space, + −: Pause time, change its speed. Time starts live; Now returns to it
Esc: Clear the selection

Where the data comes from

Stars. HYG Database v4.1 (Hipparcos, Yale, Gliese): 36,293 stars, every star within about 390 light-years plus all naked-eye stars.
Across the galaxy. Gaia DR3 luminous stars out to about 16,000 light-years; 6,818 open clusters (Hunt & Reffert 2023), 159 globular clusters (Ferrone et al. 2023), 8,107 molecular clouds (Miville-Deschênes et al. 2017), 1,413 H II regions (WISE), 2,214 Cepheids (Skowron et al. 2019), 199 masers (Reid et al. 2019), 2,481 pulsars (ATNF), 380 Wolf-Rayet stars (Rate & Crowther 2020), 344 further X-ray binaries (Avakyan et al. 2023; Neumann et al. 2023) and 645 planetary nebulae (Zhang 1995). Where catalogs run out, a modelled star field from the galaxy's density fills the view; it is dimmer and cannot be selected.
Black holes. All 87 known and candidate black holes in the Milky Way: Sagittarius A* with 39 S-stars on their measured orbits (Gillessen et al. 2017), the Gaia BH1–3 dormant binaries, the isolated lens OGLE-2011-BLG-0462, the candidate in ω Centauri and 81 X-ray binaries, with measured masses and spins where they exist. Each is ray-traced through the curved spacetime of a spinning (Kerr) black hole.
Exoplanets. NASA Exoplanet Archive, composite parameters: 4,152 systems and 5,648 confirmed planets within 1,200 parsecs.
Planets. JPL approximate ephemerides (valid 3000 BC to AD 3000), IAU rotation poles. Positions are computed live for the date shown.
Moons, asteroids and comets. NASA/JPL: all 460 known moons, and 134,723 asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, Centaurs, trans-Neptunian objects and comets moving on their real orbits. Any of them can be clicked or searched and visited.
Beyond the Milky Way. 866 galaxies within 36 million light-years (Updated Nearby Galaxy Catalog, Karachentsev et al. 2013), from the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda to the M81 and Centaurus A groups. Large spirals are drawn with the Milky Way's disk as a stand-in.
Star close-ups. Any star can be visited. Without archive data, its size and temperature are estimated from its colour and brightness.
Galaxy structure. A four-arm logarithmic spiral with a 13° pitch after Vallée (2017) and Reid et al. maser parallaxes; Sun at 8.277 kpc (GRAVITY Collaboration 2022).

Planet surfaces and the galactic disk are painted procedurally: positions, sizes and orbits are real, the textures are impressions.