Atlas of Space

Posted on by Gordon Hart

There’s a lot going on in our Solar System — so I built a digital orrery to explore it: atlasof.space!

This was a fun side project over Winter Break 2024 to learn orbital mechanics, browser animation, serverless deployment options, and of course facts about moons, asteroids, and comets. Building for yourself is a treat that I haven’t properly enjoyed in some time. Source code is available on GitHub at @gordonhart/atlasof.space.

Shared it on Hacker News on 1/8 and I was blown away by the positive feedback. Some stats:

  1. Visitors: ~36,000
  2. Bandwidth used: 361 GB
  3. Positive comments: 100+
  4. Social shares: 50+ across X, Bluesky, Mastodon
  5. Bill from Netlify: $180 (mostly bandwidth)

Shout-outs to a few enabling technologies/resources:

  • JPL for its Small-Body Database
  • Wikidata for its excellent query service
  • SolarSystemScope for planet, moon, star textures
  • Three.js for being an incredible library — performant, featureful, and straightforward
  • OpenAI and Anthropic LLMs for 10x’ing the process of learning orbital mechanics and Three.js

Click around and let me know what you learned, or what improvements you’d like to see.

BUILD: Planar Tripod

Posted on by Gordon Hart

 

 

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For my last post I included a demo of the CNC Typewriter in action. In order to film this, I realized I needed a second pair of hands around. Rather than ask a roommate to hold the camera, I figured I’d have a little fun designing a piece—and so this tripod was born.

Continue reading BUILD: Planar Tripod