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Credits and licenses

Galaxy is built on public data from space agencies and on a few openly licensed maps. This page lists every source, what was changed, and the license it is used under. Nothing here implies that any of these organizations endorse this site.

The sky

Background sky: Deep Star Maps 2020, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, made with Gaia DR2 data from ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Public domain. The brightest stars were lifted out of the map and are drawn as points of light.
Stars with distances: the HYG database, version 4.4, by David Nash (astronexus), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. The file textures/stars.pack is made from it (position, brightness and color of about 120,000 stars) and is shared under the same license.
Sizes, temperatures and companion orbits of the named stars are published values: Pourbaix and Boffin 2016 (Alpha Centauri), Bond et al. 2017 (Sirius), Bond et al. 2015 (Procyon), Torres et al. 2015 (Capella), and the Sixth Catalog of Orbits of Visual Binary Stars (61 Cygni).

Planets and the Sun

Maps of Mercury, Venus, Earth (day, night and clouds), the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the Sun: Solar System Scope, licensed CC BY 4.0. Changes: resized and compressed; Uranus and Neptune recolored (below); the Sun's map is used for its light and dark only.
Uranus and Neptune are shown in their true colors as found by Irwin et al. 2024 (MNRAS 527, 11521). The paper publishes no color numbers; the two colors were sampled from the picture released with it.
Earth through the year: Blue Marble Next Generation, NASA Earth Observatory (Reto Stöckli). Public domain. Changes: the shaded sea floor is flattened to one sea color, and sea ice is added from the usual position of the ice edge in each month. The sea ice is a model, not a measurement of any year.
Saturn's rings: Voyager measurements from the NASA Planetary Data System, Ring-Moon Systems Node. Showalter, M.R., and M.K. Gordon, VG1/VG2 SR ISS Ring Profiles V1.0 (VG_2810), and the Voyager 2 photopolarimeter occultation of Delta Scorpii (VG_2801). Public domain. The hue comes from the Solar System Scope ring picture (CC BY 4.0).
Orbits of the planets: approximate elements from NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics.

Moons and dwarf planets

Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto: global mosaics by USGS Astrogeology from NASA's Voyager and Galileo pictures. Public domain. Europa and Callisto exist only in black and white and are tinted to their average color.
Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus: global color maps by Paul Schenk, NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Lunar and Planetary Institute (PIA18434 to PIA18439). Public domain. These are enhanced color; here they are toned down to near natural.
Triton: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lunar and Planetary Institute (PIA18668). Public domain. Only about 40% of Triton was ever photographed; the rest is shown as a plain tone.
Pluto and Charon: New Horizons, NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (PIA11707 and the PDS Small Bodies Node). Public domain. Ground that was in darkness during the 2015 flyby is shown as a plain tone.
Ceres: Dawn Framing Camera mosaic, NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA, from USGS Astrogeology. Public domain.

Relief

Earth: GEBCO elevation, from NASA Earth Observatory. The Moon: Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. Mars: Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, NASA PDS. Mercury: MESSENGER elevation model, USGS Astrogeology. All public domain.

What is generated, not measured

The Milky Way seen from outside is generated on the galaxy's known plan (a bar, two main arms, the Sun in the Orion Arm). Nobody has photographed it from there.
Stars beyond about 1,500 light-years, gas clouds far from the Sun, the Oort cloud and the asteroid and Kuiper belts are generated to match what is known about them.
Weather motion on the planets, sunspots, and spots on other stars are generated.

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Design and code by Russ Muradov.

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