Welcome to webplanetarium.org!
Either you are a scientist, an astronomer, a passionate astrophile or just a simple curious person, here you may find something
interesting about what's over our head.
The purpose of this non-profit project is to create a planetarium that can be easily used through any web browser, included those you have in your smartphone/tablet.
What's in?
The Web Planetarium recreates the main features of a real planetarium: you can see the entire night sky, including stars, constellations, planets and
everything you would expect to see when looking up.
The project has its base on
Virtualsky, a project made by
Stuart Lowe when he was working for
Las Cumbres Observatory between 2010-3.
The star data are obtained from the
HYG Database by
David Nash.
These are some of the features that have been added (as of August 2025) to webplanetarium.org:
- a responsive layout in order to be easily browsed from smartphones and tablets
- an interactive dropdown menu (top left)
- some shortcut icon buttons to speed up the user experience
- an extended database of 41394 stars from Hipparcos catalogue (up to Mag. 8.0)
- HMS, DEG, distance in parsecs, spectral class and constellation of belonging for each star in database
- a screen centered (red) square to be used as pointer (best solution for all kind of devices)
- micro adjustments through keyboard arrows (while SHIFT+Arrow move faster) to center objects with accuracy
- progressive zoom-in/out to increase/decrease magnitude level to show/hide fainter stars (mouse wheel or numpad +/- do the same)
- a mini detail box for each object pointed, with links to extended info panel/images
- a detailed image panel for each star/object (when available) retrieved from the Aladin Sky Atlas public API
- stars names for all the alpha stars and most of the secondary stars
- stars blinking and glowing effects to add realism
- a detail panel for Sun, Moon and Solar System Planets surfaces retrieved from Aladin
- orbit lines for all the planets of the solar system, showing markers of past and future positions for each planet.
- the whole Messier and NGC catalogues and relative detailed image also retrieved from Aladin
- Ceres and Pallas and major asteroids
- some of the major comets who passed by recently
- a panel showing Jupiter's Galileian moons position (at time set in the planetarium), integrating an improvement of Sky and Telescope script
- the moon phases shown on the sky and on an extended detail integrating an improvement of Salvatore Ruiu script
- a Planet Journey to navigate the solar system planets' position on the sky: you can move the map center to point the planets one after the other, forth and back recursively
- some major asterisms and their description
- some major man-made objects (i.e. artificial satellites and orbital stations) to see their current position
- a powerful database search in order to find Stars and Constellations (by names), Sun, Moon, Planets, Messier's and NGC's objects position on the map
- ... and much more!
