Projects / Interactive Demo
Orrery
A heliocentric solar-system console driven by high-accuracy ephemerides.
What it does
Orrery — codenamed HELIOS — is a 3D solar-system mission console for the browser. The Sun sits at the center, the planets march along their actual orbits, and a roster of moons, asteroids, and comets fills out the scene. Time runs continuously, and you can scrub it forward, backward, or jump to "now" to see the current geometry of the solar system at this very instant.
What you can do
Real ephemerides
Planet positions are driven by the high-accuracy Astronomy Engine library — not toy approximations. What you see at a given UTC timestamp matches the real sky.
Body roster & telemetry
Browse a left-side roster of planets, moons, and minor bodies; tap any of them to focus the camera and read live telemetry on the right.
Time scrubbing
Play, pause, reverse, accelerate, decelerate, or jump to NOW. Watch a Mars year in seconds, or freeze time at a specific Julian Date.
Custom body insertion
Define your own asteroid, comet, or hypothetical world by classical Keplerian elements (a, e, i, Ω, ω, M₀) and watch it slot into the simulation.
Camera presets
Jump between curated viewpoints — top-down ecliptic, edge-on, or focused close-ups of any selected body.
Mission-console UI
Dark theme, monospace telemetry, scanlines, and corner crosshairs — less explorer-of-the-cosmos and more flight-controller-on-shift.
Why it exists
Orrery is a sister project to Orbits — same aesthetic, same Codex-assisted build pattern, different scale. Where Orbits zooms in to a single satellite around Earth, Orrery zooms out to the whole solar system and asks: where is everything right now, and where will it be tomorrow, next year, or a century from now?
Technology
Built with vanilla JavaScript, Three.js for WebGL rendering, and the Astronomy Engine library for high-accuracy planetary positions. Custom Keplerian propagation is used for user-defined bodies. Like Orbits, everything runs in the browser — no backend, no signup.