Getting started

Universe Map runs entirely in a modern browser. It does not require an account and does not call an application backend. Astronomical catalogues, textures, and models are served as static files and are loaded progressively as the camera changes scale.

Open the map

Visit super-universe.app. The first view loads the rendering engine and the compact manifest; larger stellar and galactic datasets are fetched only when needed.

For the best first experience:

1. use a current desktop browser with WebGL 2 enabled;
2. leave graphics quality on High when using a recent discrete or integrated GPU;
3. wait for the loading overlay to disappear before navigating;
4. scroll over a visible object or click its name to choose a destination.

The map also supports touch navigation and automatically reduces visual density on smaller devices.

Interface tour

Area	Purpose
Top search	Find planets, moons, stars, exoplanets, galaxies, black holes, supernovas, and large-scale structures.
Scale breadcrumb	Shows the current astronomical hierarchy and provides direct parent navigation.
Object card	Displays source facts, aliases, physical properties, confidence, and focus actions.
Floating controls	Zoom, return to Earth or the Sun, and toggle orbits, constellations, and names.
Timeline	Edit UTC time, pause or play, select speed, browse eclipse events, and return to the present.
Map scale	Shows an adapted screen scale for the current camera context.

A first journey

Try this sequence to understand semantic zoom:

1. search for Earth and select the result;
2. use the wheel or pinch gesture to move outward through the Solar System;
3. select Sun, then keep zooming out to reveal the stellar neighbourhood;
4. choose Milky Way from the scale menu;
5. continue to the Local Group, nearby Universe, and cosmic web;
6. use the breadcrumb to return toward the Solar System.

The logical target defines the map hierarchy and distance constraints, the geometric camera pivot defines the orbit centre, and the selected object defines the information card. Explicit focus often aligns all three, but pointer zoom and free-space navigation can separate them.

Observe a star from Earth

Search for a star such as Sirius, open its information card, then choose Locate from Earth. Universe Map opens the local sky at the map's current date and observation place. Drag to look around, use the wheel or a pinch gesture to change the field of view, and select Recenter to recover the target. These are planetarium controls: the wheel does not trigger semantic map-scale traversal or minimum-distance travel while the horizon view is open. Names and modern constellation figures can be shown independently. The location picker offers 461 static observer places worldwide, and both the observer and planetarium view are retained in a shared URL. Use my location requests browser permission only when selected, rounds the resulting coordinates to three decimal degrees (roughly 100 m), and then uses the same shareable observer contract.

The Moon and visible planets reuse the same Three.js objects, materials, lighting, and sourced or adapted textures as the map view. Their topocentric directions and angular diameters are calculated for the selected place and time. A bounded minimum display size keeps small planets inspectable and is explicitly illustrative rather than a claim about their physical angular size.

The horizon follows viewing azimuth and stays fixed to the ground while the sky follows time. Eight featured cities have hand-composed visual contexts; every catalogue place lazily loads four nearby landmark records from regional static packs. The 461 catalogue places also load compact obstruction profiles calculated from the NOAA/NCEI ETOPO 2022 60 arc-second surface-elevation model. This regional relief can hide stars, the Moon, and planets. Documented names, coordinates, or heights do not make the rendered city measured: buildings, city lights, skyline layers, generic landmark outlines, and the plain used for custom coordinates remain explicitly illustrative.

Direction, altitude, azimuth, precession, nutation, atmospheric refraction, and catalogue-location terrain obstruction are calculated in the browser or in the reproducible static data build. The ETOPO mask is model-derived regional relief rather than surveyed local geometry; it omits buildings, vegetation, and micro-relief. The view is not a weather model, a historical city reconstruction, or a professional observation-planning tool.

Graphics quality

The settings panel offers three profiles:

• Low reduces particles, texture resolution, volumetric samples, and streamed tiles;
• Medium balances detail and GPU cost;
• High enables the richest bounded representation supported by the current scale.

Changing quality never changes catalogue coordinates or scientific confidence. It only changes the rendering budget.

Share a view

Use the share control to copy the current URL. A shared link preserves at least the target, selected object, time, zoom, temporal mode, graphics quality, name density, orbit visibility, constellation visibility, and label visibility.

The URL updates after a short delay rather than on every rendered frame.

Next: Navigation and scale.