3D Solar System Simulator

What you can explore

Every body in the Solar System view exists for a reason — either it is large enough to be visible, or it tells a story worth seeing.

• All eight major planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — with high-resolution surface textures.
• Earth with a true day-night terminator, animated clouds, city-light night side, and an atmosphere shader that reproduces Rayleigh scattering at sunrise and sunset.
• The Sun rendered as a multi-layered effect with corona, surface granulation, and flare particles.
• Jupiter's Galilean moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, plus Saturn's Mimas, Enceladus, Titan, and Iapetus.
• Uranus's tipped system with Titania, Oberon, and Umbriel, and Neptune's retrograde moon Triton.
• Earth's Moon and Pluto's Charon, both at realistic distances and inclinations.
• Dwarf planets Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake, toggleable as a layer.
• The asteroids Vesta, Pallas, and 16 Psyche, loaded as full 3D models you can fly around.
• Saturn's rings rendered as a textured disc with proper shadowing.
• An accurate starfield background derived from real star catalog data.

Physics, not pretty animations

Every body's position is integrated from gravitational force at each frame, so the orbits are emergent — they are what gravity actually does, not pre-baked Bezier curves. Initial state vectors come from ephemeris data for today's date, so the planets are roughly where they really are in the sky. Axial tilts and rotation periods are taken from observed values: Venus rotates backwards over 243 days, Uranus is tipped 97.8 degrees so it rolls along its orbit, Triton orbits Neptune in retrograde at 157 degrees of inclination, and Pluto and Charon are tidally locked to each other. None of that is hard-coded animation — it falls out of the physics.

Camera, time, and controls

The default camera flies freely with mouse and trackpad. Click any body to focus on it and the camera tracks it through its orbit. Press F to drop back to a system-wide view, C for Cinema Mode where the UI fades, or Space to pause. Time scaling lets you slow the simulation down to a real-time crawl or accelerate to thousands of years per second. Optional layers let you toggle orbit lines, motion trails, body names, the coordinate grid, and the dwarf-planet and asteroid groups.

Eclipses and lighting

Shadows are computed in shader from the geometry of each body relative to the Sun, so eclipses and occlusions just happen when the math says they should — when Io passes behind Jupiter, when the Moon enters Earth's shadow, when Mercury transits the Sun. Each planet's day-night terminator, specular highlight on water, and atmospheric glow are part of the lit material, not an overlay.

Performance and platform

Orbitarius runs on Babylon.js and WebGL with custom shaders for planet shading, atmospheres, the Sun, eclipses, and the orbit lines. Textures are stored in KTX2 (Basis Universal) format so the GPU can decode them directly, with mobile-friendly RGBA fallbacks for devices without ASTC or BC7 support. Tier-1 textures (Sun, planets, rings, skybox) gate the loading screen; moons and dwarf planets stream in afterwards so you start interacting within a couple of seconds even on a fresh visit.