Orrery Space हिन्दी Open the app

The Orrery Guide

Explore the universe,
one step at a time

Orrery is a free 3D map of space you can fly through: from the Moon, to the planets, to stars with their own planets, to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and out to galaxies billions of light-years away.

Start simple. Go as deep as you like.

Part 1

The universe in six steps

Space is mostly empty, and very, very big. Orrery lets you visit it in six steps, each one far bigger than the last. Click a step to see it.

The Moon in Orrery's Moon explorer

The Moon

Our nearest neighbour. Light from the Moon reaches you in just over one second. In Orrery you can spin the whole Moon, and stand on it where real robots will land.

Light takes 1.3 seconds to get here.

Go to the Moon
How long light takes: each mark is ten times farther than the one before it. A straight ruler could not fit them on one page.
Moon1.3 s Sun8.3 min Neptune4.2 h Proxima4.2 years Galactic centre27,000 years Andromeda2.5 million years Farthest galaxy2.2 billion years

Why "explorer scale"?

At true scale the planets are specks: Earth is 12,742 km across but 150 million km from the Sun, so a true-scale Solar System on a screen is a few dots in a black field. Orrery's Explorer scale enlarges the bodies and squeezes the distances so you can see everything at once; True scale (top bar) puts every size and distance back. Between the stars, distances are compressed linearly, so the stars keep their true relative distances and the voyage panel tells you by how much.

Part 2

Your first flight

Five steps. No account, no download, nothing to install.

  1. Open Orrery

    Go to orreryspace.com/app and press Start. The Sun and all eight planets appear, moving on their real orbits for today's date.

  2. Click a planet

    Click Saturn, or any world. The camera flies there and a card opens with its facts: how big it is, how long its day lasts, how cold it gets.

  3. Look around

    Drag to turn. Scroll (or pinch on a phone) to zoom in and out. Press Recentre to see the whole Solar System again.

  4. Search anything

    Press / or the Search button and type a name: Europa, Halley, TRAPPIST-1e, Andromeda. Press Enter to go there.

  5. Leave home

    Press Galaxy to fly out of the Solar System into the Milky Way, or Nearby systems to visit another star.

Orrery's Solar System: the Sun, the planets and their orbit paths, with the top bar of buttons
Step 1: the whole Solar System, today.
Saturn up close in Orrery, with its information card open
Step 2: click a world and fly to it.

The buttons along the top

Search /
Find any planet, moon, comet, mission, star system, exoplanet, star cluster or galaxy.
Atlas
Every world in one list, grouped: planets, moons, dwarf planets, asteroids, comets.
Tour
A guided walk through the Solar System, stop by stop.
Journey
Ride a probe out to the outer planets.
Spacecraft
Board a research vessel and fly the real Solar System from its cockpit, with real orbits and burns.
Nearby systems
Travel to other stars: 13 hand-checked neighbours and 4,728 more planetary systems.
Galaxy
Leave the Solar System and fly the Milky Way, its star clusters, its central black hole, and the galaxies beyond.
Sky
The Observatory: the night sky from anywhere on Earth, its stars and deep-sky objects.
Missions
Real spacecraft and where they went.
Lunar sites
The Lunar Mission Browser: compare landing sites at the Moon's south pole.
Meteors
Meteor showers and the comets that cause them.
Compare
Sizes and distances side by side.
Gravity
Your weight on every world.
Explorer / True
Switch between the enlarged view and real sizes and distances.
Time bar
At the bottom: pause, run time faster or backwards, pick any date, or jump back to Today.

On a phone the same tools sit in the bar at the bottom: Fly, Atlas, Sky, and More for the rest.

Part 3

Ten places to visit

Each card opens Orrery right there. Level 2 tells you what to try; Level 3 tells you what is real.

Saturn and its rings in Orrery

The Solar System

The Sun, eight planets, their moons, and lots of comets and dwarf planets, all moving where they really are today.

Try this

  • Click Earth, then Interior to cut it open and see its layers.
  • Drag the time bar to watch the planets move. Comets swing past the Sun.
  • Turn on the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt in View.

What is real

Planet surfaces are NASA and USGS maps. Positions come from published orbital elements and ephemerides. Earth uses NASA's Blue Marble, Black Marble city lights and real clouds (from 2001, not today's weather).

Open the Solar System
Standing on the Moon near Shackleton crater: grey ground, the long shadow of the rim, and the black sky

Stand on the Moon

Spin the whole Moon, then stand where a robot would land and look around: the ground, the Sun and Earth in the black sky.

Try this

  • Click a site near the south pole, then Stand here.
  • Press Live to see the sky as it is at this very moment.
  • Use Zoom to Earth: from the Moon, Earth looks about 2° wide, almost four times the Moon's width in our sky.

What is real

The ground is NASA's LOLA laser-altimeter data: a 5 m grid for 4 km around eight landing sites, then 10 m, 120 m and 720 m rings out to 150 km. Lighting is computed from the real Sun position. The Sun and Earth are drawn at their true angular sizes. Rocks and small craters are procedural and labelled so.

Explore the Moon
The Moon's south pole in 3D, lit for a chosen hour

Plan a Moon landing

Be a mission planner: where at the Moon's south pole is there sunlight for solar panels, and a view of Earth to talk home?

Try this

  • Pick two sites and compare their sunlight over a month.
  • Raise the mast: a taller antenna sees Earth more often.
  • Open the 30-day heat map: crater rims glow, crater floors stay dark.

What is real

Terrain from LOLA, Earth and Sun positions checked against JPL Horizons, and the Deep Space Network's real antennas. The browser runs more than 250 automatic checks.

Open the Lunar Mission Browser
The Alpha Centauri system in Orrery

The stars next door

Our Sun is a star. Other stars are suns too, and some have planets. Visit Alpha Centauri, the closest, in a few seconds.

Try this

  • Press Nearby systems and pick Proxima Centauri.
  • Turn on the Habitable zone: the green band where water could be liquid.
  • Visit TRAPPIST-1: seven Earth-sized planets, closer to their star than Mercury is to ours.

What is real

Thirteen systems out to 40.7 light-years, hand-checked: Gaia DR3 distances, NASA Exoplanet Archive planets, interferometry for Alpha Centauri and Sirius. A radius worked out from a mass is labelled estimated, and a minimum mass is labelled minimum.

Visit the stars
The Kepler-186 system in Orrery: a red dwarf and its five planets on their orbits

4,728 other planetary systems

Astronomers have found more than 6,000 planets around other stars. Every one with a known orbit is in Orrery, and you can fly to any of them.

Try this

  • Search Kepler-452 b, a planet a bit bigger than Earth with a year of 385 days.
  • In Nearby systems, type in the All known systems filter: TOI-700, HD 189733, 51 Peg.
  • Open a planet's card: it says how it was found and in which year.

What is real

Every number comes from the NASA Exoplanet Archive (6,299 planets). Alternative names (KOI, TOI, Gliese) come from Celestia. When only one of period or orbit size is known, the other is worked out from Kepler's third law, and the card says so. Planet colours are artist's renderings: almost none of these worlds has ever been photographed.

Fly to Kepler-186

Prefer to read? Every system has its own page.

The Milky Way seen from outside in Orrery's galaxy mode

The Milky Way

Our galaxy: hundreds of billions of stars in a spiral, 100,000 light-years across. The Sun is one tiny dot about halfway out.

Try this

  • Hold W to speed up and S to slow down. Drag to steer.
  • Press M for the galaxy map, click a place, then Engage route: the autopilot flies you there.
  • Press V to scan nearby objects into your survey log (B).

What is real

The shape follows published measurements: a 2.6 kpc disc, a long bar at 28°, two major arms, two minor ones, and the Orion Spur that holds the Sun, 26,996 light-years from the centre. Individual stars beyond the catalogues are procedural, seeded so they are the same every visit.

Enter the galaxy
Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, with light bent around it

The black hole at the centre

At the very middle of our galaxy is a black hole as heavy as 4.3 million Suns. Its gravity is so strong that it bends light around it.

Try this

  • Fly close: the stars behind it stretch into rings.
  • Watch the ship's clock: near the black hole your time runs slower than Earth's.
  • Find the S-stars that orbit it in only a few years.
  • Race the star S2 through its pass of the hole in May 2018: keep pace as it speeds up sixteen-fold.

What is real

Mass from the GRAVITY collaboration (2022), imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope. The lensing is computed by ray-marching around the hole, and time dilation by the Schwarzschild formula. The S-stars follow published orbits.

Go to Sagittarius A* Race the star S2
The globular cluster 47 Tucanae seen from 600 light-years away in galaxy mode

Star clusters

Some stars live in crowds. Young ones in loose groups like the Pleiades; very old ones in huge balls of hundreds of thousands of stars.

Try this

  • Search 47 Tuc or Omega Centauri, the two biggest globular clusters you can see without a telescope.
  • Search Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, 443 light-years away.
  • On the galaxy map: globular clusters crowd round the centre; open clusters crowd round the Sun.

What is real

All 196 globular clusters of Baumgardt et al. (2023), with their measured core and tidal radii, and 6,476 open clusters of the Unified Cluster Catalogue (Perren et al. 2023). Open clusters bunch near the Sun because dust hides the far ones, not because they are not there. Member stars are drawn procedurally inside each cluster's measured size.

Enter the galaxy
The Local Universe: the Milky Way and thousands of galaxies around it, with Andromeda ahead

The Local Universe

Our galaxy is one of countless galaxies. Step outside it and see 10,933 of them at their real distances, then fly to one.

Try this

  • In galaxy mode press Local Universe. Andromeda is straight ahead.
  • Open the map, search M 87 or Sombrero, and engage the route.
  • Arrive at a galaxy: its shape (spiral, barred, round) follows its real type, tilt and size.

What is real

Positions and sizes from Steinicke's Revised NGC/IC catalogue, with distances from NED, Cepheids, the tip of the red-giant branch, surface-brightness fluctuations or Tully-Fisher, otherwise from redshift (H₀ = 73.2). The tilt of each galaxy reproduces published position angles to within a few degrees. The stars, arms and bars you fly through are procedural.

Step into the Local Universe
A cutaway of Earth in Orrery showing its crust, mantle and core

Learning tools

Short, hands-on lessons hidden inside Orrery: how heavy you would be on Mars, how big Jupiter is next to Earth, why there are meteor showers.

Try this

  • Gravity: type your weight and see it on every world.
  • Compare: line up planets by size.
  • Meteors: find the comet behind each shower.
  • On Earth's card, Earth-Moon lab: tides, eclipses and phases.

What is real

Surface gravities, sizes and meteor radiants from NASA and IAU data, with the source named on each card.

Open Orrery

Part 4

Controls

Mouse

Click to choose. Drag to turn. Scroll to zoom.

Touch

Tap to choose. Swipe to turn. Pinch to zoom.

Keyboard

/ search · Esc close or go back

In galaxy mode

W / SFaster / slower, through a ladder of warp speeds. The fastest steps open only well outside the Milky Way.
DragSteer the ship
MGalaxy map: search, click a destination, Engage route
TRoute to Sagittarius A*
VScan what is near you
BSurvey log of everything you have scanned
EscLeave galaxy mode

Part 5

Is it real?

Measured

Where things are, how big they are, how they move. These come from NASA, ESA and astronomers' catalogues, and every number has a source.

Imagined, and labelled

What nobody has photographed yet: the colours of far-away planets, the single stars inside a cluster, the spiral arms of a far galaxy. Orrery always tells you when it is showing you a picture it had to make up.

Sources

WhatFrom
Planet and moon surfacesNASA, USGS and mission mosaics; Earth from NASA Blue Marble and Black Marble
Orbits and positions in the Solar SystemPublished orbital elements; JPL Horizons for checks
The Moon's terrain and photosLRO LOLA (5 m–1 km grids), LRO WAC and NAC images
Nearby starsGaia DR3 parallaxes via SIMBAD; Hipparcos for the brightest
Exoplanets (6,299 + hand-checked 13 systems)NASA Exoplanet Archive pscomppars; names from Celestia
Habitable zonesKopparapu et al. (2014)
The Milky Way's shapePublished disc, bar and arm geometry; R₀ = 8.277 kpc (GRAVITY)
Sagittarius A*GRAVITY 2022 mass; Event Horizon Telescope
Globular clusters (196)Baumgardt et al. (2023), MNRAS
Open clusters (6,476)Unified Cluster Catalogue, Perren et al. (2023)
Galaxies (10,933)Steinicke's Revised NGC/IC; distances from NED-1D and named methods

The full list, with links and licences, is in the project's SOURCES.md. Every world in Explore lists its own sources.

Part 6

Space words

Orbit
The path one thing takes around another, like Earth around the Sun.
Light-year
How far light travels in a year: 9.46 trillion km. It is a distance, not a time.
Moon
A world that goes around a planet. Jupiter has dozens.
Exoplanet
A planet going around a star that is not our Sun.
Habitable zone
The distance from a star where water could stay liquid on a planet's surface. It does not mean anything lives there.
Star cluster
A family of stars born together that still travel together.
Galaxy
A huge city of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity. Ours is the Milky Way.
Black hole
So much mass in so little space that not even light can climb out.
AU
Astronomical unit: Earth's average distance from the Sun, 149.6 million km.
Parsec
3.26 light-years: the distance at which a star shifts by one arcsecond as Earth goes round the Sun.
Parallax
That shift. Measuring it (Gaia does it for over a billion stars) is how star distances are known.
Hubble type
A galaxy's shape class: E (elliptical, E0 round to E6 flat), S0 (lenticular), Sa–Sc (spirals, tight to loose), SB (barred), Irr (irregular).
Minimum mass
A planet found by its star's wobble gives only M sin i: its true mass is at least this, more if its orbit is tilted toward us.

Part 7

Questions

Does it cost anything?

No. Orrery Space is free, with no sign-up, and runs in your web browser.

Will it work on my phone?

Yes. A recent phone works; a computer with a graphics card gives the smoothest flight. The home page checks your device for you.

Why are the planets so big compared with the distances?

That is Explorer scale, so you can see them. Switch to True scale in the top bar for the real proportions.

Can I use it in class?

Please do. There are five ready lessons for teachers, the Lunar Mission Browser has one-click examples for a quick lesson, and every world has a printable guide in Explore.

Something looks wrong. What do I do?

Orrery labels everything it had to estimate or imagine. If a number seems off, check the source named on its card; if it is still wrong, tell us, and we will fix it.

Ready?

The universe is waiting. Start with one click.

StartOnline 3D model