The Universe in 3D
A view of the cosmos you can turn in your hands — the nearest stars at their true distances, the Solar System to scale, a constellation revealed as a line-of-sight illusion. Every point sits at a measured position; nothing is placed at a guessed one, and where the data has no geometry to plot, the scene tells you so.
The scenes
What can be shown in true 3D →Constellations on the Celestial Sphere
Interactive 3DThe stars of a constellation shown by their real directions on the celestial sphere — the pattern as it appears from Earth. Turn on the true-distance figures in the table and a striking fact appears: the stars of a constellation lie at wildly different distances and are not physically connected at all. The familiar shape is a line-of-sight illusion.
Direction only — the celestial sphere
The Local Group
DescriptiveOur galactic neighbourhood — the Milky Way, Andromeda, Triangulum, the Magellanic Clouds, and the dozens of dwarf galaxies bound with them. The members and their relationships are drawn from the graph; their separations are given by the catalogue's descriptive scale labels, because numeric inter-galactic distances and positions are not part of the data.
Descriptive — no numeric geometry available
The Local Stellar Neighbourhood in 3D
Interactive 3DThe nearest stars to the Sun, plotted at their true three-dimensional positions from measured parallax distances. This is the view a two-dimensional star chart cannot give: not just where a star lies on the sky, but how far away it truly is. Drag to fly around the neighbourhood; the Sun sits at the centre.
Distance-true — real measured 3D positions
The Milky Way
DescriptiveOur home galaxy and the Sun's place within it. The measured part of this picture — the local stellar neighbourhood — is the real 3D star field; the wider structure of the Galaxy (its disc, bulge, bar, spiral arms, halo, and centre) is presented from the galactic-structure catalogue as described components, because numeric galaxy-scale positions are not part of the data.
Descriptive — no numeric geometry available
The Solar System in 3D
Interactive 3DAn interactive, to-scale model of the Sun's planetary system. Each orbit ring is drawn at the planet's real semi-major axis, so the true structure of the system — the crowded inner planets and the vast reaches of the outer ones — is genuine. Drag to rotate the system, scroll to zoom.
To scale — real relative distances
How these scenes are drawn
The interactive scenes render on a 2D canvas from the same measured coordinates that back the Sky Atlas — right ascension, declination, parallax distance, and orbital semi-major axes already in the knowledge graph. They complete the Atlas’s “3D-ready” views. A star with no measured distance is never placed in a distance-true scene; a galaxy with only a descriptive scale label is never given invented coordinates. With JavaScript off, or when a scene has no numeric geometry, a server-rendered static image and a data table carry the same real data. See data coverage and source quality.