What You're Looking At
A 3D model of Earth, viewed from space, with up to 5,000 currently-active satellites rendered at their real positions right now. The scene is computed from orbital elements published by US Space Command, served via Space-Track.org (with CelesTrak as a fallback) — the same catalog satellite operators use every day.
What the Dots Mean
LEO — Low Earth Orbit (below 2,000 km). Starlink, ISS, Earth observation. Fastest movers.
MEO — Medium Earth Orbit (2,000–35,586 km). GPS, Galileo, GLONASS navigation.
GEO — Geostationary (~35,786 km). Communications and weather, fixed above the equator.
HEO — Highly Elliptical. Long sweeping arcs, high apogee.
The Three Faint Rings
The faint colored circles around Earth aren't decoration — they're shells. The teal ring marks the LEO ceiling (~2,000 km). The gold ring is the GPS / MEO band (~20,200 km). The red ring is the iconic geostationary belt (~35,786 km), where every weather and broadcast satellite sits motionless above the equator. Almost everything humanity has ever put in orbit lives in one of those three shells. Toggle them off with the Orbit Shells button if you'd rather see the raw cloud.
The White Arcs
Each white arc is one near-Earth asteroid passing through Earth's neighborhood this week, pulled live from NASA CNEOS. The small sphere on each arc marks its closest-approach point. Arcs drawn in red are flagged as Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHA) — close enough and large enough that NASA tracks them with extra attention. The arcs are stylized representations of the flyby plane, not literal trajectories. Toggle them with the Asteroid Arcs button.
Navigating the Scene
Drag to rotate. Scroll or use the + / − buttons in the top-right to zoom. Click the square icon for fullscreen mode (great for deeper analysis or presenting). Pinch to zoom on touch devices. The view auto-rotates by default — turn it off in the HUD if you'd rather steer.
The Moon
The grey body off in the distance is the Moon, placed at its real geocentric position right now (~384,400 km from Earth, roughly 60 Earth radii — zoom out to find it). Its position is computed live from the current UTC using a standard low-precision lunar ephemeris. The Moon is lit by the same directional sunlight that lights Earth, so the phase you see — new, crescent, half, gibbous, full — matches the phase the real Moon is showing tonight. At true scale the Moon would render as a tiny dot, so the body is drawn ~4× oversized for legibility (its position is unchanged); this is the same convention NASA Eyes and most planetariums use. If the Moon appears to sweep across the view, that's the camera auto-rotation — toggle Auto-rotate off and the Moon will sit nearly still, as it does in reality (~0.5°/hour). Toggle the body itself with the Moon button.
How the Scene Updates
Positions are computed server-side from current orbital elements every time you load the page, then refreshed every few minutes. Earth's orientation and the day/night terminator are driven by real UTC and solar declination — the sunlit hemisphere you see is the sunlit Earth right now, accurate to the actual subsolar point. The Moon's geocentric position and lunar phase update every minute from the same UTC clock.
The Narrator
The text overlay in the top-left is generated server-side from the same data — no language model, no per-request AI cost. It picks a few facts worth surfacing and assembles them into a paragraph. If the day is unusual (a hazardous asteroid close in, a geomagnetic storm), the narrator says so.
What This Page Is Not
This is not a collision-avoidance tool. It's not a definitive satellite catalog. The propagation is simplified two-body Keplerian — accurate to a few kilometers for visualization, not for engineering. For authoritative tracking, see CelesTrak or Space-Track.