Interactive universe map: from Earth to galaxies beyond our own

Measured facts

Reference destinations

22 core reference destinations, plus catalogue galaxies and cosmic regions

Beyond our galaxy

Local Group, nearby galaxies and a bounded 2MRS redshift-space survey

Measured stars

371,766 Gaia DR3 sources inside 100 pc

Time range

2020-01-01 00:00 TDB through 2040-01-01 00:00 TDB (no extrapolation)

Renderer

WebGL2, Three.js, one continuous scene

Why it counts as a real 3D map

Bodies are drawn at published mean radii and placed at interpolated positions from a validated JPL Horizons archive, not arranged for visual convenience. When you fly from Earth to Mars, the distance you cross is the actual measured separation at the selected date.

Because no single floating-point scene can hold metre-scale surface detail and kiloparsec-scale structure, COSMOS swaps renderers behind a continuous camera instead of swapping pages. The outgoing renderer stays live until the incoming one is fully faded in, so the star field, labels and selection never blink out.

The scale ladder you travel through

Earth surface detail

Tiled Blue Marble imagery to roughly 611 m per pixel, floor 180 km

Earth to Moon

387,439 km · 1.3 seconds light time

Earth to Mars

1.866 AU AU · 15.52 minutes light time

Nearest named star

1.302 pc · 4.246 ly

Measured stellar volume

100 pc, 100 checksum-verified chunks

Galactic model

230,000 tracers, 20 kpc boundary

How to drive it

• Search for a body, star, feature or the Galaxy and the camera flies there; breadcrumbs stay clickable for the way back.
• Use the object shortcuts for the five most-visited destinations, and the zoom controls for logarithmic travel.
• Press NOW to return the ephemeris to the present epoch inside the archive, and use the date control to move planets to a different date.
• Toggle between Earth and the Milky Way to see the measured catalogue hand over to the derived reconstruction, with the boundary disclosed in the panel.
• Open the science panel to see provenance, delivered resolution, active frame and camera floor for whatever you are looking at.

What the map does not contain

• Gaia stars are measured within 100 pc. The Milky Way and extragalactic interiors are reconstructions, not a catalogue of individually measured distant stars.
• Moon landing uses a separate terrain-following surface mode. Sub-resolution detail and historical hardware are labelled reconstructions, not measured centimetre-scale data.
• No orbit paths, no mutual shadowing, and no physical ring-particle rendering.
• No live imagery: every layer is a dated product or an archived position.