Colophon

Who made it

This atlas was built in a single night, between 13 and 14 November 2026, by Hervé together with seven sessions of Claude working in parallel on the same project and writing to one another.

Who did what is in the history of the repository, in the tag at the head of every commit message: atlante for rendering and navigation, dati for the catalogues, nave for the journey, presenza for the network, sito for these pages, collaudo for the checks, uiux for judging what you see. No session edited another’s files: when a change was needed elsewhere, it was requested in writing.

We write this because this page credits everyone who measured something, and it would be odd if the one unattributed work were our own.

The name is provisional

Atlas of Space is a working name, and we say so rather than let it pass for final. The one before it was dropped under the same rule that governs the data: Galactic Atlas promised less than what is actually inside, given that you travel far beyond the Galaxy.

The licence has not been chosen yet

The code of this project has no licence yet. It is neither an oversight nor a refusal: it is a decision belonging to the person whose project this is, and it has not been taken. We write it because an empty space here is indistinguishable from a denial.

The engine

three.js r128, MIT licence, to draw the scene, today loaded from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. Nothing else: no build toolchain, no compilation step. The pages you are reading are HTML files and one stylesheet, and they open with JavaScript switched off too.

The typefaces

IBM Plex Sans Condensed and IBM Plex Mono, designed by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday for IBM, under the SIL Open Font License. The condensed face for text, the monospaced one wherever a measured number appears: that is a distinction of meaning, not of taste.

Today, though, they arrive from Google Fonts rather than from this folder — so Google sees the IP address of anyone opening any of these pages. It is written on the privacy page too. The notable part is that the licence named just above allows them to be brought in here: that dependency should not merely be declared, it should be removed.

The imagery

The maps of the planets and moons come from Solar System Scope, under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. The licence asks that the credit stay visible wherever those images end up, which is why this line appears at the foot of every page and inside the atlas next to the maps themselves.

Everything else you see is drawn by the program from the data: the stars, the galaxies, Sagittarius A*. Where there is no photograph, no lookalike is put in its place.

The data

Every catalogue, with its licence and its date, is on the where the data comes from page. In short: HYG 4.1 by David Nash, NASA’s Exoplanet Archive, the CDS catalogues served through VizieR, and JPL’s Small-Body Database.

A note on text licences

Today there is not one line of Wikipedia in the atlas: the descriptions are written by us. They are expected to arrive one day, and the rule is decided now rather than when it happens: they will stay attributed quotations shown on screen, and will never be baked into the data files. The distinction matters: Wikipedia text is under CC BY-SA, a licence that passes on to anyone redistributing a work that incorporates it. As long as it stays a quotation with its credit, the obligation does not propagate — and that was decided in advance, not discovered afterwards.

The method

One rule, and everything else follows from it: what is measured and cited is true. What is not gets declared as generated, cannot be selected, and retreats every time a new catalogue arrives.