Space Radar
A free, live 3D map of space: the satellites and the International Space Station, launches, probes, the planets and their moons, the stars and the galaxies, each drawn where it really is.
The map needs JavaScript, which is off here. It works out every position in your browser from public orbit data, so nothing could be drawn without it.
The map needs WebGL 2 to draw the sky, and this browser cannot give it.
Everything on the map says whether it is measured, modelled or illustrative. What is below opens as plain pages and needs neither.
Read about it
The trips
A trip is a guided flight through the map. Each opens in the map itself, so it needs JavaScript and WebGL 2. This is what each one covers.
- A dark sky. Your sky from a city, a town and a dark place.
- A year in a minute. A year of orbits in a minute.
- Across the Local Group. Our galaxy, its biggest companion, Andromeda, Triangulum.
- Asteroids, and the ones that come close. The belt, the rocks that pass us, and how we moved one.
- Back to the Moon. Artemis: round the Moon again, and where they mean to land.
- Black holes. Three real black holes: where they are and how we know.
- Chasing the solar eclipse. The next total eclipse's shadow crossing the Earth.
- Comets and meteor showers. A comet, its dust and the next shower from your street.
- From your ground to the space station. Straight up to the station and its next pass.
- From your roof to the edge. One flight out past the Moon, the planets and the stars, and one flight home.
- Inside a neighbouring galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula, its giant stars.
- Into the Helix. A dying star: its photograph, its shape in 3D and its heart.
- Mars, where we have driven. A volcano, a canyon, five landing sites and a moon.
- Out past Jupiter, to the farthest thing we sent. Ten stops through the cold outer worlds.
- Out to the edge of the universe we can see. Past the Local Group and a quasar to the oldest light.
- Satellites and space junk. Everything working in orbit today, the ring that stands still, and the junk.
- The birth of the Solar System. The story science tells, told over real places.
- The constellations. Twelve figures of the night sky, drawn star by star.
- The life of a star. From a cloud of gas to a pulsar: one real star at each age, then back to Earth.
- The living Earth. One planet's cycles with today's data: storms, sea, ice.
- The planets tonight. Every planet in turn, then where to look tonight.
- The sky as telescopes see it. Real photographs, each where it is in the sky.
- The strangest things we have ever sent. A family photograph, two golf balls, a library, a record and a car.
- The Sun today. Our star, its wind, and tonight's aurora forecast.
- To the edge of what we know. From the Sun to a photographed black hole.
- Tonight from your street. Your own sky tonight: a star, a figure, the Moon, a planet, the station's pass.
- Travel to exoplanets. Other stars' planets, then TRAPPIST-1's seven.
- Where people are living in space right now. The only two places above you tonight with people inside them.
- Where we have landed on the Moon. Landings from the first to the private ones.
- Why the Moon changes shape. The Moon's month from space, then from your street.