Credits.

Built and maintained by Polyxmedia. The viewer is free, has no signup, and ships with all source attributions intact. Where licences require attribution, the original source is linked below — most notably NASA imagery (public domain) and Solar System Scope textures (CC BY 4.0).

Imagery & textures

• NASA Public-domain photographs, surface and atmosphere imagery, and mission archives that anchor every body in the viewer.
• NASA Visible Earth, Blue Marble: Clouds (MODIS Terra, 2001) Earth's cloud cover: the 8K cloud map and the 1 km cloud tiles are built from NASA's original 43200 x 21600 cloud layer (public domain), with NASA's infrared fill over the poles.
• NASA GIBS, Landsat WELD (1999 annual composite) The Earth imagery streamed as you zoom in, worldwide at up to about 31 m.
• NASA Black Marble 2016 (Suomi NPP VIIRS) The city lights at night close up, at about 500 m, from NASA Earth Observatory through NASA GIBS.
• Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX The Earth's finest imagery level, about 10 m. Sentinel-2 cloudless - https://s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0.
• Solar System Scope High-resolution planet, moon, and sky textures (CC BY 4.0). The 4K and 8K spheres you see on every world come from here.
• ESO — European Southern Observatory Milky Way panorama and deep-sky imagery used in the starfield backdrop.
• NASA / JPL — Voyager, Cassini, Galileo, New Horizons, Juno, Perseverance The mission imagery underlying the surface texture for every body in the outer solar system.

Data sources

• NASA Planetary Fact Sheets Authoritative reference for every planetary number on this site — diameters, distances, orbital periods, axial tilts.
• JPL Horizons Ephemeris data for positions and orbital parameters of comets, asteroids, dwarf planets, and the major bodies.
• The Space Devs, Launch Library 2 The SpaceX launch schedule, results and boosters on the SpaceX tracker. Launch data provided by The Space Devs.
• CelesTrak Orbit data for every active satellite (US Space Force tracking): the satellites in the viewer, the ISS tracker and the Starlink count.
• IAU Minor Planet Center Designations and orbital elements for asteroids and near-Earth objects.
• Wikipedia & Wikidata Cross-referenced for every body for additional context, named-entity links, and consistency checks.

Rendering, audio & animation

• Three.js WebGL engine that powers the entire 3D viewer — meshes, custom GLSL shaders, post-processing, and the live planet thumbnails on the homepage.
• GSAP — GreenSock Animation Platform Camera fly-throughs, panel transitions, and the cinematic narrative animations.
• Tone.js Procedural ambient soundtrack — pads, drones, sub bass, and the ascending arpeggios you hear in the viewer.
• Vite Build tool and dev server.
• Vitest Test runner.

Open standards

• WebGL 2.0 & GLSL The graphics standard the viewer relies on. The Sun, Earth, and atmosphere shaders are written in GLSL ES.
• glTF 2.0 Format for the spacecraft and probe models that appear in the viewer.
• Schema.org & Wikidata Structured-data vocabulary used across every page so search engines and AI assistants can understand what each body is.

3D models

• "Meteorite" by Hailphilly Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Used as the drifting meteoroids scattered through the system.
• "Comet" by organ collector Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
• "Asteroid 101955 Bennu" by Geo_Monkey Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
• "Asteroid 01" by exabyte Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
• "Asteroid Field (100 x medium-Poly)" by Sereib Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
• "Asteroid Field (100 x low-Poly)" by Sereib Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
• "Asteroid" by Cyber Kriss Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
• "Naboo Starfighter_01" by rodrigoscar Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Flyable as the Naboo N-1 Starfighter in the craft picker.

Inspiration

• Carl Sagan For teaching the world that rigour and wonder belong together.
• Eyes on the Solar System (NASA/JPL) The benchmark for what a real-time, accurate, browser-based solar system viewer should feel like.
• Apollo For Earthrise.

Found something missing?

If you spot a credit we should add — a texture artist, a data source, an open-source project — let us know via Polyxmedia and we will add it. Last updated October 2026.

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