Buried four million years ago. Reactivated at first sunrise.
BEST ON A BIGGER SCREEN
This interactive 3D solar system runs on phones and tablets too — but the fly mode and fine controls feel best on a desktop or laptop with a mouse and keyboard.
Solar System Scope — the Venus, Mars, Uranus and Neptune textures. solarsystemscope.com/textures (CC BY 4.0). The other worlds use NASA, USGS, ESA and NOAA mission data; see /credits/.
NASA Blue Marble / Earth Observations (NEO) — high-resolution Earth daymap and supporting imagery.
NASA Visible Earth, Blue Marble: Clouds (MODIS Terra, 2001). Earth's cloud map and its 1 km cloud tiles, built from the original 43200 x 21600 cloud layer and NASA's infrared polar fill. NASA Earth Observatory (public domain).
NASA GIBS — worldwide Landsat WELD surface reflectance imagery (1999 annual composite), streamed at up to approximately 31 m resolution. Global Imagery Browse Services.
NASA Black Marble 2016 (Suomi NPP VIIRS Day/Night Band, NASA Earth Observatory), the city lights at night close up, at about 500 m, through NASA GIBS. Night Lights.
Sentinel-2 cloudless — the Earth's finest imagery level (about 10 m), composed onto the Landsat pages and colour-matched to them. Sentinel-2 cloudless - https://s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0.
NASA / JPL-Caltech — assorted Mars (MOLA), Mercury (MESSENGER), and outer-planet reference imagery.
USGS Astrogeology Science Center — bump / elevation source material for rocky bodies.
Deep-Sky & Background Imagery
NASA, ESA, STScI & the Hubble Heritage Team — M42 Orion, M8 Lagoon, M16 Pillars of Creation, M51 Whirlpool, M57 Ring, M104 Sombrero, M1 Crab, NGC 7293 Helix, and others.
Where CC BY licensing applies (Max Vizell's Ranger, Solar System Scope textures, ESO DSO imagery, M31 by Adam Evans), the attribution above satisfies the license requirement; remixers should retain it.
Star Map
Pick a star system to warp to. Sol is home; Alpha Centauri is the closest neighbour. Procedurally generated systems land here as the galactic map expands.