Everything in the atlas

Designed and built by Arun Singh in New Delhi.

• Images and maps — planets and the Sun: Solar System Scope (opens in a new tab) (CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)), via Wikimedia Commons, resized, converted to WebP and re-tinted in the shaders; the Milky Way band: ESO/S. Brunier (CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new tab)), eso0932a, point sources removed, resized and re-tinted in the shaders (the Solar System Scope map stands in until it loads); galaxy photographs and other images from NASA, ESA, ESO and the EHT Collaboration, under open licences or in the public domain, each credited on screen while it fills the view and in full on How the Atlas is built. The section galaxies sit at their real relative positions in the Local Group and the catalogued neighbours in their real directions; the rest are generated to follow the cosmic web. The Ceres, Haumea, Eris and Makemake maps are artistic impressions.
• Type — Cormorant by Christian Thalmann and IBM Plex Mono by IBM, both under the SIL Open Font License (opens in a new tab).
• Built with — Three.js (opens in a new tab), GSAP (opens in a new tab), postprocessing (opens in a new tab), Vite (opens in a new tab) and Fastify (opens in a new tab).
• The section galaxies up close, the Sun’s corona and the atmospheres are procedural shaders, generated from a fixed seed.
• Stars are plotted from GitHub activity, one per commit or deploy. Currently DEMO DATA: the counts and timestamps are seeded until the live feed is connected.

How the Atlas is built→