100,000 Stars is a WebGL journey through nearby stellar data, beginning with the scale of the Milky Way and moving towards named stars around the Sun. A guided tour and free navigation turn an abstract catalogue into a navigable sense of stellar distance.
Take the guided tour first
Let the opening sequence establish the scale before skipping into free movement. It narrows an overwhelming field into a few meaningful steps and shows how the controls, labels and different levels of detail fit together.
Explore the solar neighbourhood
Once the tour reaches nearby space, select named stars and compare their position, colour and distance from the Sun. The temperature legend helps explain why the points are not all rendered with the same colour.
Read it as a visual model
The experience draws from astronomical data but cannot render every star in the Milky Way or show each object literally. It is designed to communicate scale and neighbourhood, with linked summaries providing context for selected stars.
Things to know
- The visualisation represents a fraction of the galaxy rather than every star.
- Some explanatory text is drawn from external reference material.
- The older WebGL experience can perform poorly on mobile devices.