The Milky Way, to scale

An interactive zoom through our galaxy, from low Earth orbit to the Andromeda galaxy, fourteen and a half orders of magnitude on one scroll wheel. Nothing is faked to stay visible: stars dim with distance and vanish below the eye's limit, dust reddens and hides what lies behind it, planets shine only by reflected sunlight.

Real data throughout: the nearby stars and the 88 constellations, star clusters, nebulae, nearby galaxies, exoplanet systems, the Solar System's planets and moons, the Oort cloud, the spiral arms and the central black hole Sagittarius A*. Requires a browser with WebGPU.

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GALAXY-SCALE · BOOT SEQUENCE
SOL → SGR A* · 8.178 kpc · Z₀ 20.8 pc
THE MILKY WAYTO SCALE · 1 : 1
  1. LINKmodule graph
  2. GPUadapter
  3. DEVICEqueue · buffer limits
  4. SHADERSrender pipelines
  5. FIELDdensity integral
  6. SCENEcatalogue · orbits · sky
  7. FRAMEfirst light
T+0.000000 %
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year 0
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halted galactic