One continuous map, from planet surfaces out to the edge of the observable Universe.

Move around

Drag

Rotate the view (on a phone: one finger)

Scroll · + −

Zoom in and out (on a phone: pinch). Keep zooming past the edge to move to the next level.

Click

Select an object or its name. Click a selected star or galaxy again to fly inside.

Search · /

Type any planet, moon, star, exoplanet, galaxy or black hole and press Enter.

Change level

Scale list

T0 Surface → T1 Orbital → T2 Interstellar → T3 Galactic → T4 Cosmic. Click any level to jump there.

0 1 2 3 4

The same five levels from the keyboard (0 = Surface … 4 = Cosmic)

Esc

Leave a planet close-up or a black hole

Time

Time speed

How fast the simulated clock runs. “Now” returns to today.

Space

Pause and resume

Cockpit

C

Enter or leave the cockpit

W S · scroll

Thrust forward and back · set the throttle

Drag · arrows

Steer

A D · R F · Q E

Slide sideways · up and down · roll

[ ]

Speed range, from ×0.001 to ×10,000

T · X

Autopilot to the selected target · full stop

G

Real physics: gravity and true orbital mechanics inside a planetary system. O drops you into a circular orbit, comma and period slow down and speed up time.

What in Cosmossian is measured, what is computed, and what is illustrative. Values are rounded for display.

Computed from real data

• Planet positions from the JPL Keplerian elements of E. M. Standish (“Approximate Positions of the Planets”, valid 1800–2050), solved with Kepler's equation for the simulated date. Typical error: well under a degree.
• Planet velocity from the vis-viva equation using GM☉ = 1.32712440018 × 10¹¹ km³/s².
• Planet and moon physical data (radius, period, axial tilt, rotation): NASA Planetary Fact Sheets and JPL Solar System Dynamics.
• Star positions: J2000 right ascension and declination with published distances, spectral types and luminosities (SIMBAD values).
• Exoplanet catalogue: the Open Exoplanet Catalogue (Rein 2012; MIT licence), snapshot of confirmed planets through 2023: about 5,300 planets around 3,900 stars. Missing semi-major axes are derived from Kepler's third law. Habitable-zone flag: insolation 0.36–1.1× Earth and radius ≤ 2.5 R⊕ (conservative zone after Kopparapu et al. 2013). Planets found since 2023 are not yet included.
• Hand-curated exoplanets (TRAPPIST-1, Proxima, Barnard's Star and others): orbital periods and semi-major axes from the NASA Exoplanet Archive. Where only mass is known, radius is estimated as R ≈ M^0.28 (Earth units) and flagged “est.”.
• Milky Way objects (black holes, remnants, nebulae, clusters) are placed by galactic longitude, latitude and distance relative to the Sun.
• Galaxies, clusters and events: RA/Dec, redshift and distances from NED/SIMBAD and discovery papers. Far objects show light-travel distance and today's comoving distance.

Real imagery

• Earth: NASA Blue Marble surface colour, NASA night-lights composite, land elevation, a water mask and a global cloud snapshot (NASA Visible Earth products, as packaged with the open-source three-globe library).
• Moon: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter colour mosaic with laser-altimeter elevation (NASA, as packaged with the open-source globe.gl library).
• Mars: Viking orbiter colour mosaic from the NASA 3D Resources collection.
• Cockpit: the switch panels, centre-console keypads and monitor frames are photographs of Space Shuttle Columbia's flight deck (NASA Johnson Space Center, 2001, from the NASA 3D Resources collection). The window frames and glareshield around them are modelled, and the monitors show live Cosmossian data rather than Shuttle software.
• Other planets and moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Phobos, Deimos, Titania, Oberon and the Venus radar surface are spacecraft mosaics from the NASA 3D Resources collection (Galileo, Voyager, Viking, Magellan). Mercury, Venus’s cloud tops, Uranus, Enceladus and Triton are spacecraft-based maps distributed with the Stellarium planetarium (Oleg Pluton, CC BY 4.0; NASA/JPL and the Cassini imaging team). Where a spacecraft never photographed part of a moon (Callisto, Titania, Oberon), that part is generated. Titan stays generated because its haze hides the surface. Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune use 4,096-pixel true-colour maps by Askaniy Anpilogov, built from NASA/JPL-Caltech, Cassini, Juno and Voyager data and Björn Jónsson’s mosaics (CC BY 3.0, as distributed with Celestia).
• Nebulae you can fly into: built as glowing volumes from each nebula’s class: hydrogen glows red, oxygen teal, dust blocks light, and the hot stars inside light the gas. Colours and shapes follow the real objects (for example the Ring’s shell, the Eagle’s pillars, the Veil’s filaments), but the 3D structure is a physical model, not a photograph or a measured map.
• The sky: 15,696 real stars down to magnitude 7, with distances, colours and Hipparcos / Henry Draper numbers, from the HYG database v4.1 (David Nash, astronexus; CC BY-SA 4.0). Each star is placed in three dimensions, so the sky seen from another star’s system is redrawn from there. In this app the sky’s equator is laid along the plane of the planets’ orbits; in reality the two are tilted by 23.4°.
• Constellations: the 88 constellations and their line figures from Stellarium’s “modern” sky culture (CC BY-SA 4.0).
• Deep-sky objects: 760 objects, the Messier list and the brighter NGC and IC objects, from the astronexus deep-sky collection built on the NGC/IC project (CC BY-SA 4.0). They are marked in Earth’s sky only.
• Asteroids, comets and dwarf planets: 476 notable bodies with orbital elements from the Minor Planet Center and JPL, as distributed with Stellarium (2026 elements), moved along their true ellipses, parabolas or hyperbolas. This is not the full catalogue of about 1.4 million known asteroids; the grey belt behind them is illustrative.
• Meteor showers: 43 showers from the International Meteor Organization working list (via Stellarium): dates, peak rates, speeds, radiants and parent bodies, drawn on the stretch of Earth’s orbit where each is active.
• Satellites and space debris: 33,333 tracked objects from the public US Space Force catalogue (elements of March 2026, as packaged by the open-source KeepTrack project). Each is moved along its orbit from those elements, including the slow twist caused by Earth’s bulge. Positions drift from reality as the elements age, and objects smaller than about 10 cm are not tracked at all.
• Meteorite landings: 32,186 located entries from the Meteoritical Society’s database (NASA open-data copy, through 2013).
• These maps resolve features down to roughly 10 km (Earth, Moon) and 20 km (Mars). Closer than that, the app adds generated detail on top, so small craters, hills and waves near the ground are illustrative. If the image files cannot load, a fully generated surface is shown instead.

Not to scale

• Planet orbits use r^0.6 compression; stars and galaxies use logarithmic distance. Body sizes are exaggerated so they remain visible.
• Satellites and debris are drawn at their true distance relative to Earth’s size, while the Moon’s orbit is compressed, so the outer satellite ring appears beyond the Moon outside the cockpit. Inside the cockpit everything is at true scale.
• Moon orbits are drawn at multiples of the planet's radius; time-dilated motion is capped to stay legible.

Illustrative

• Every other surface (the other planets and moons, exoplanets, stars) is procedural and generated on the GPU. Those are not maps; surfaces of exoplanets are unknown.
• Galaxy shapes beyond the Milky Way are generated from their Hubble type and size. The cosmic web and the CMB pattern are illustrative, not survey or Planck data.

Cockpit speeds are converted back to physical units through each view's distance mapping, so they are approximate; faster-than-light travel is a simulation convenience. Inside a planetary system the cockpit switches to true sizes and distances; the target camera is a simulated long lens. With Real physics on, the ship obeys Newtonian gravity from the star, planets and moons at their real masses (masses of exoplanets and their stars are estimated from radius); there is no atmosphere or drag, and the moons’ positions along their orbits are not from an ephemeris.

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