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.