SOLAR EXPLORER

Live · One physical world

One world.
No scene cuts.

Begin beside Earth, then keep travelling. The same coordinate spine carries every body, star, camera and field.

Scroll to travel

Live catalog · In build dynamic sky

Space does not stop at a backdrop.

Gaia and ATHYG can supply catalog-backed stellar depth around the camera. The default static sky is still being replaced by that same real-star law.

  • LiveCatalog depth streamed around a journey
  • Star lightOne flux-conserving PSF
  • In buildDynamic backdrop replacing the static sky

Live camera · In build arrival grammar

Frame the journey, not the cut.

Author-directed field of view and opening clearance already shape each shot. One cross-scale arrival language is being built so every approach obeys the same spatial grammar.

  • LivePer-shot field of view
  • LiveAnchor-relative opening framing
  • In buildUnified cross-scale arrivals

Live core · Entities with physics

An entity earns its detail.

Objects are not interchangeable dots. Each one resolves through the capabilities its data supports, from a catalog identity to a physical trail, articulated structure, or native lens.

  • Sagittarius A*Native lens path · final look in review
  • Physical cometsFinson–Probstein dust · corrected jets
  • SpacecraftStarlink live · Voyager integration next

In build · Light becomes material

A surface should answer the light.

The science foundations now describe airless regolith, atmospheric scattering and eclipse shadowing. Their shared production-visible material path is still being integrated.

  • HapkeAirless-body authority and parity landed
  • AtmosphereScattering LUT substrate landed, not yet loaded
  • EclipsesOcclusion math landed, presentation in build

Foundation live · In build

Stand somewhere. Choose a time.

A real latitude, longitude and time already produce GMST, altitude, azimuth and zenith. The complete horizon, sky-body presentation and time-driven world are still joining the spine.

  • Foundation liveEarth observer coordinate math
  • In buildHorizon, twilight, Moon and planets
  • In buildDeterministic epoch and Kepler wiring

Next · What resolves next

Every addition joins the same world.

Point-to-terrain surface detail, Voyager in the world, aurora curtains and CME-driven space weather are next. None needs a separate scene to exist.

  • From point to terrainGeneric surface LOD
  • Voyager 1Articulated asset ready for world integration
  • Space weatherCME to aurora, on shared atmosphere physics

Sources & system notes

Status

Live
Integrated capability with current code and verification evidence.
In build
A landed foundation or active integration that is not yet a finished visible capability.
Next
Planned work whose prerequisites or production integration remain open.

Provenance

Real data uses source catalogues or orbital elements. Schematic preserves structure without claiming catalog completeness. Model-derived visualizes a documented model rather than a photographed boundary.

The colored nebulae are deterministic Schematic volumes inspired by emission-line palettes, not survey imagery.

The engineering of scale

A ledger, not a feature list. Every line has a limit printed next to it.

Sources

Credits

Planet textures © Solar System Scope, CC BY 4.0.

Rendering by Three.js r169, MIT.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA, JPL, ESA or the DESI collaboration. Public data is used under its own terms and credited above.

About this page

The solar system you scrolled through is drawn from the Explorer's real orbital elements and its real scale resolvers. Everything beyond the heliosphere is a seeded stand-in built for this page — the Explorer resolves those layers from catalogues far too large to send to a landing page. The rail told you which was which, the whole way down.

Solar Explorer is a rendering pack inside Clipper. This page is a standalone showcase and runs from static files.

On the edge that isn't one

The observable universe is 46.3 billion light-years in comoving radius, from Planck18.comoving_distance(inf) with H₀ = 67.66 and Ωm = 0.30966. It is a horizon of information, not a wall: it marks how far light has had time to reach us, not where space stops. It is larger than 13.8 billion light-years because space expanded while that light was in transit — a change in the metric itself, which is not anything travelling faster than light. The Explorer stores this anchor with the caveat already attached: "Cosmology-model anchor, not a direct observation or physical edge."

Where the Explorer resolves the large-scale structure from DESI DR1, the survey's own limit rides along with it: "DESI DR1 LSS clustering catalogs are survey-footprint tracers with selection weights, not a complete all-sky galaxy census."