Nothing in here was invented.

A three-dimensional map of space that you cross the way you cross a place. It holds only what someone has actually measured: 95,987 stars at the distance they really are, 2,413 planets confirmed one by one, 21 moons with the periods they have. Where the measurements end, the map says so instead of filling in the gap.

This browser cannot open the atlas. The map draws a hundred thousand stars at once, and to do that it needs WebGL — the way a web page talks to the graphics card. It is not available here: that happens with very old browsers, or when hardware acceleration has been switched off. The rest of the site works fine.

Enter the atlas

The descent takes eight seconds: don’t touch anything. Nothing to install, and no account needed.

Every stop below is a measured distance. The line is logarithmic: each step is ten times the one before it.

the Moon384,400 km

the Sun1 AU

Proxima Centauri1.30 pc

center of the Galaxy8.18 kpc

Andromeda0.78 Mpc

the Coma Cluster99 Mpc

The surface of the Moon

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mosaic, in tiles that arrive as you descend. Not a texture that looks like the Moon: the Moon where it is, crater by crater. The relief is another matter: measured elevation, today, we only have for Earth, and where it is missing the body stays a sphere instead of faking mountains.

A star with confirmed planets

1,709 systems from NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, each with the semi-major axis, period, radius and mass measured by the people who found them.

The center of the Galaxy

Sagittarius A*, at 8.18 kiloparsecs: mass and distance from the measurements of the GRAVITY collaboration.

What we do not know is marked as such

A planetarium can fill the sky with invented stars and nobody notices: to the eye they are identical to the real ones, and there are far more of them. We did the opposite, and it cost us objects.

Beyond roughly three thousand parsecs no catalogue holds the individual stars of the Milky Way: the ones you see out there are built from published density models, and the map says so. Galaxies whose direction we know but whose distance we do not have not been thrown away — they are waiting, and they will appear the day a measurement reaches them.

You cannot click on what has not been measured. If an object can be selected, it has a distance and a source, and both are written on its card.

Where the data comes from — catalogue by catalogue, with licence and date.