Solar System Simulator
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Credits and licenses

Solar System Simulator stands on generous open work. Here is who made it and how we use it.

Planet textures

Surface, cloud, night-light and ring textures and the Milky Way panorama are from Solar System Scope by INOVE, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Solar System Scope bases them on NASA imagery and elevation data. We resized them, converted them to WebP, and brightened the Milky Way panorama with a smoothing filter.

Stars

Star positions, brightness and colours come from the HYG Database version 4.1 by David Nash (astronexus), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. We kept the 8,920 stars brighter than magnitude 6.5, converted their positions to the J2000 ecliptic frame and packed them into a compact binary file. That derived file, /data/stars.bin with its index /data/stars.json, is shared under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Positions and physical data

  • Astronomy Engine by Don Cross, MIT License: planet, Moon and Galilean moon positions, body orientations and the eclipse and event searches.
  • NASA JPL: satellite mean orbital elements and physical parameters (ssd.jpl.nasa.gov), and the Horizons system we test against. NASA data are not copyrighted.
  • NASA Planetary Fact Sheets (nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov) for sizes, masses, gravity, day lengths, tilts and temperatures.
  • IAU WGCCRE 2015 rotation models for the orientation of the Sun, Moon and planets.

Software and fonts

  • three.js, MIT License: 3D rendering.
  • Space Grotesk by Florian Karsten and Manrope by Mikhail Sharanda, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.

Using our pictures

Pictures saved from the simulator include Solar System Scope textures and, where stars are visible, HYG star data. If you publish one, please credit "Solar System Simulator (solarsystemsimulator.com); textures by Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0); stars from the HYG Database (CC BY-SA 4.0)".