The project

Most representations of the solar system suffer from the same problem: they're either to scale and unreadable (the Sun and planets become invisible dots kilometers apart), or readable but completely wrong in their proportions. Astrolab 3D tries to offer both honestly, with a button to switch between a simplified view designed for exploration, and a true-to-scale view that shows just how crushing the real distances are.

The rendering relies on real planetary textures (craters on Mercury, cloud bands on Jupiter, Saturn's rings, Earth's night lights…) and dynamic lighting consistent with the Sun's position, so every planet has a real day/night terminator instead of a flat color.

What you can do

• Explore freely in 3D — drag to orbit the camera, scroll to zoom, double-click a planet to fly closer.
• Open a detailed sheet for every planet and dwarf planet: diameter, mass, density, gravity, escape velocity, axial tilt, atmosphere, and a few striking facts.
• Compare two bodies side by side, with a visualization to scale of their relative sizes.
• Switch between simplified and realistic scale, to feel the difference between an educational view and the reality of the distances involved.
• Show the dwarf planets (Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea) along with an explanation of the official definition of a "planet" adopted by the IAU in 2006.

The solar system in brief

Our solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. Nearly all the matter concentrated at the center to form the Sun, which alone accounts for 99.86% of the system's total mass. The rest flattened into a disk, in which the planets gradually assembled through accretion.

Planets are generally split into two families. The terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), close to the Sun, are small, dense, and rocky. The gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn) and ice giants (Uranus, Neptune), much farther out, are enormous but not very dense, made mostly of hydrogen, helium, and ices. Between Mars and Jupiter lies the asteroid belt, rocky debris that never assembled into a planet because of Jupiter's gravitational influence.

Beyond Neptune begins the Kuiper Belt, an icy region home to Pluto and several other dwarf planets. It was precisely the discovery of objects comparable to Pluto in this region that pushed the International Astronomical Union to redefine what a "planet" is in 2006, reclassifying Pluto as a dwarf planet.

Comets, asteroids, meteors, constellations… our glossary covers in detail the concepts orbiting the solar system.

The technology behind Astrolab 3D

The site is a static web application, with no server and no database: all the 3D rendering happens directly in your browser with Three.js and a physically based rendering (PBR) pipeline, including dynamic lighting, atmospheric glow, and post-processing (bloom). Planetary textures come from Solar System Scope, under a Creative Commons license — full credits and licenses are listed on the dedicated page.