Data & Credits

Aetherion is built on public scientific data and open-source software. Positions are computed live in your browser; knowledge refreshes weekly.

Scientific data

• Planetary positions: JPL “Approximate Positions of the Planets” Keplerian elements (E. M. Standish, NASA/JPL), plus a low-precision lunar theory. Accurate to roughly arcminutes for 1800–2050. Not for navigation.
• Live satellites: orbital element sets from CelesTrak (Dr. T.S. Kelso), refreshed every six hours and propagated with SGP4.
• Stars: ~41,000 stars to magnitude 8 from the HYG Database (David Nash, CC BY-SA 2.5), via the d3-celestial project (Olaf Frohn, BSD-3-Clause). Constellation figures from d3-celestial.
• Exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet Archive (Caltech/IPAC), Planetary Systems Composite Parameters, refreshed weekly.
• Stars and deep-sky objects: SIMBAD (CDS, Strasbourg) and ESA Gaia DR3, queried live when you ask and cached. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and of data from the European Space Agency mission Gaia, processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium.
• Asteroids and comets: NASA JPL Small-Body Database, queried live and cached.
• Landing sites: coordinates read from Wikidata items (CC0), each linked from the answer that uses it.
• Close approaches: NASA JPL Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) close-approach data API.
• Weekly knowledge: public news feeds from NASA and ESA, and new astrophysics preprints from arXiv.org, summarized by Aetherion each week. Always check the original sources linked in the digest.
• Earth imagery: NASA Visible Earth / Blue Marble and Black Marble (public domain), as packaged by the three-globe project (MIT).
• Earth up close: Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX IT Services GmbH (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), licensed under CC BY 4.0; tiles are cached on this server.
• Place names and borders: Made with Natural Earth (public domain). Other places are found with the Open-Meteo geocoding API (CC BY 4.0, data from GeoNames).
• Deep-sky catalog: every Messier, NGC and IC object (about 12,000 galaxies, nebulae and star clusters) from OpenNGC by Mattia Verga, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Distances from Wikidata (CC0), Gaia parallaxes and redshifts. Objects without a measured distance are placed at a typical distance for their kind, and Aetherion says so.
• Stars in 3D: about 109,000 stars with measured distances from the HYG Database v4.1 (David Nash / astronexus, CC BY-SA 4.0), which combines the Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star and Gliese catalogs. Leave the solar system and every star sits at its real place in space.
• Asteroids, comets and dwarf planets: orbits of about 4,200 of the largest asteroids, near-Earth asteroids, Jupiter Trojans, centaurs, Kuiper Belt objects and periodic comets from the NASA JPL Small-Body Database, propagated live in your browser.
• Spacecraft: positions of Voyager 1 and 2, New Horizons, the James Webb Space Telescope, Parker Solar Probe, Juno, Europa Clipper, Lucy, Psyche, JUICE and BepiColombo from NASA JPL Horizons, refreshed daily.
• The galaxy map: about 43,500 galaxies at their real positions from the 2MASS Redshift Survey (Huchra et al. 2012, ApJS 199, 26; catalog v2.4), with distances from redshift (H0 = 70 km/s/Mpc), and the galaxies of the Local Group from Wikidata (CC0).
• The shapes drawn for individual galaxies, nebulae and star clusters, and the cosmic web beyond about a billion light-years, are artistic representations placed at real positions and sizes. The positions and distances are survey data; the detailed shapes are illustrative.

Software

• three.js (MIT) for 3D rendering.
• satellite.js (MIT) for SGP4 orbit propagation.
• Fonts: Cinzel, Manrope and JetBrains Mono (SIL Open Font License) via Google Fonts.
• Aetherion’s answers are written by xAI Grok from numbered records pulled from the sources above. Every number and catalog name in an answer is checked against those records before you hear it; anything that cannot be matched is removed, and when no record exists Aetherion says so rather than guessing. Open “Sources” under any answer to check it yourself, and see the grounding benchmark for how this compares with Grok answering on its own.
• Aetherion’s voice is generated with xAI text-to-speech. The music and sound effects are original and synthesized live in your browser.
• ISS pass predictions are computed in your browser from CelesTrak orbital elements. City search uses the Open-Meteo geocoding API (CC BY 4.0), with data from GeoNames.

Privacy

Aetherion learns from the questions travelers ask. Questions, answers and Helpful / Not right votes are stored without your IP address or any account, kept for about 90 days, and reviewed weekly to improve answers and to choose the questions shown as “Travelers are asking”. Please don’t include personal details in questions. IP addresses are used only briefly, in hashed form, for rate limiting. If you ask when the ISS passes over you, your location is used in your own browser, rounded to about 1 km, and is never sent to our server. Your layer, sound and theme settings are kept in your browser’s local storage.

About

Aetherion, its character and this site are original works. Built in the Coachella Valley.