Fly between stars placed at their real distances — leave Earth, and the constellations fall apart.
About this scene
The stars are not pasted onto a celestial sphere: each one sits at the distance its parallax implies, in real 3D space. The constellation lines join the stars themselves, so flying away from Earth bends and breaks them on its own — no animation, just geometry. Orion's belt looks evenly spaced from Earth; in depth the three stars are nothing of the kind.
Brightness is computed from wherever the camera is. The catalog stores absolute magnitude, and apparent magnitude is derived every frame as a function of distance. That makes the Sun just another star: a bright 0.5-magnitude point from α Centauri, and magnitude 10.7 from Betelgeuse (152.7 pc) — well past what any eye can see.
About the data
Near Earth this catalog is complete to naked-eye brightness (magnitude 6.5) — the sky you arrive in is the real one, as seen from Earth.
The epoch slider extrapolates each star along a straight line from its measured proper motion and radial velocity (±100,000 years — beyond that the Galaxy's gravity curves the paths and a straight line stops being true). About 11.5% of stars have no measured radial velocity, so they drift across the sky but never approach or recede, and 21 stars with no velocity on record stay put.
Interstellar extinction is ignored. In reality, gas and dust absorb starlight, so distant stars — especially toward the Milky Way's plane — are dimmer and redder than they are drawn here.
The scene starts on a lightweight ~34,000-star catalog and swaps in the full ~120,000-star one once the connection is idle. On the lightweight tier the field thins out below about magnitude 4, even as seen from Earth.
Star catalog: AT-HYG v4.0 (David Nash / astronexus, CC BY-SA 4.0) / Constellation figures: d3-celestial (Olaf Frohn, BSD-3-Clause)
The binaries this page loads are derivatives of AT-HYG (positions converted to Sun-centred J2000 cartesian parsecs, absolute magnitudes recomputed, colours baked from B−V) and are likewise offered under CC BY-SA 4.0. A handful of supergiants whose parallax is unusable carry a curated literature distance instead.
About 2 minutes: Earth → Orion → Betelgeuse → the Big Dipper → the sky in 100,000 years → home.
See a constellation from the side
Jump to a famous star
Controls