Dim the room, keep light off the screen, and give your eyes a minute to adapt. In a bright room none of this is meaningful.
Raise your screen brightness until you can just make out patch 2. Patch 1 should sit at the edge of visibility, and the field around them must read as black, not dark grey. This is the one adjustment that matters most — the sky is faint sources on black.
Shows a full-white field, so do this after the black point. Every patch should stay distinct from the surround. Patches merging into the white mean your display clips highlights, and the brightest stars will lose their colour.
Every band should be distinguishable from its neighbours. Bands merging at the dark end mean brightness is too low; merging at the bright end means it is too high.
Step back until the stripes blur together. The patch that disappears into its surround is your display's transfer. A display behaving as Stellata assumes matches the one marked sRGB — that is the reference, and the numbered stops either side are a scale for how far off you sit. This one is a reading, not an adjustment: most displays offer no control over it.
Stellata is an observational 3D model of our galaxy that simulates what it would be like to actually be there. It includes — real stars, the planets of our Solar System, the Sun's heliopause, local interstellar dust, and the Milky Way backdrop: every object comes from a published catalogue or direct measurement.
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, and hover for more information. Click a star to focus it, click a second star to measure the distance between them, and click the far end to travel there. Search “Sol” to come home, and press ? for keyboard shortcuts.
Explore and you'll find variable and multiple star systems, all represented as if you were actually there. Try observing the sky from a focused star, pull up sky charts, or warp between the stars.
Stellata isn't optimised for small screens or touch input yet. For the full experience — search, keyboard shortcuts, and precise camera control — open it on a desktop browser with a keyboard.
You're welcome to look around, but some controls will be awkward without a keyboard and pointer.
Stellata is an physics-grounded, observational 3D model of our local part of the universe. The goal of Stellata is to convey what it would really look like to move through our galaxy and universe. From individual stars and their planets, through the local interstellar medium and its molecular clouds, out to the structure of the galactic disc and the nearest galaxies. Every object in Stellata comes from databases of direct, empirical measurement. Theoretical predictions and conjectured structures are excluded. The model will continue to incorporate new observational data as astronomers continue to expand our knowledge.
Every object is rendered at the colour and apparent brightness you would actually see from any given point in space, including the effects of dust extinction and reddening through the interstellar medium. Known variable stars pulsate at their catalogue period, close binaries orbit on their measured elements, and every star's position advances from its catalogue epoch to the current date along its measured motion in space. The local molecular clouds (Taurus, Orion, Ophiuchus and their neighbours) are drawn as dust silhouettes traced directly from the 3D dust map. When focused on Sol, the eight planets and Pluto render at their heliocentric positions for the current wall-clock time, all with their major moons, atmospheres, axial tilt and rotation, with faint orbit rings for reference.
313,257 stars come from the AT-HYG catalogue, cross-matched with the GCVS variable-star catalogue and the Hipparcos CCDM list of visual binaries, expanding the set to 329,350 stars. The local molecular clouds are traced from the Zucker 2020 & 2021 catalogues and the Edenhofer 3D dust map; the nearest galaxies come from the Local Volume Database. See the Credits tab for the full list and more details.
There are two camera modes: Navigate orbits, zooms, and warps between stars; Observe parks the camera's vantage point at the focused star and lets you look around. Press M while observing to switch to a Sky Atlas–style monochrome chart with proper name and Bayer labels. Press ? for the full keyboard reference.
Created by Alex Marshall and released under AGPL-3.0.
Stellata is built on a stack of real astronomical data. Every catalogue and dataset used to render the scene is listed below.
Full citations and modelling notes live in SCIENCE.md in the source repository.