Space 3D

These pages render live 3D scenes of space objects in the browser - drag to orbit the camera, scroll or pinch to zoom, and click objects to read the facts panel beside the scene. The 3D engine loads once (about 0.7 MB) and is cached, and everything renders on your device with WebGL; nothing about your visit is sent to a server.

• Solar System 3D Explorer - Free Online

  Solar System 3D Explorer - All eight planets orbit the sun live on screen - drag to orbit the view, scroll or pinch to zoom, and watch inner planets lap th...

• Black Hole 3D Visualizer - Free Online

  Black Hole 3D Visualizer - Tens of thousands of glowing particles orbit the black event-horizon sphere, and the inner ones circle faster - the same reason ...

• Galaxy 3D Simulator - Free Online

  Galaxy 3D Simulator - Up to 100,000 points form the spiral arms on desktop (30,000 on phones so rotation stays smooth) - a real feel for how thin and vast ...

Honest about accuracy

These scenes are educational visualizations, not physical simulations. The solar system view compresses planet sizes and orbital distances onto one screen - true scale would leave the planets invisible - and the page says so next to the scene. The black hole scene is an artistic approximation of an accretion disk; it does not solve the equations of general relativity. The facts panels, in contrast, carry real published figures: planet diameters and orbital periods, and measured properties of known black holes. Where a number is rounded or a scale is compressed, the page states it.

What you need

A browser with WebGL - every current version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari qualifies, on desktop and on phones. On a device without WebGL the page shows a plain notice instead of a broken canvas. Each scene has a fullscreen button beside the canvas, and Escape returns to the page. Lower-powered phones automatically get lighter scenes (fewer rendered points) so rotation stays smooth.

Made for curiosity

Scene	Good for	Real figures in the panel
Solar System 3D Explorer	Comparing orbits and looking up planet facts while you watch them move	Diameters in km, distances in AU, orbital periods for all 8 planets
Black Hole 3D Visualizer	Seeing why the disk glows and reading what an event horizon actually is	Sagittarius A* and M87* masses, the km-per-solar-mass horizon rule
Galaxy 3D Simulator	Getting a feel for spiral structure and the sheer point-count of a galaxy	Milky Way star count, diameter, the sun's position and orbit

What each scene teaches

The solar system scene is really a lesson about ratios. Planet positions are animated so the period relationships hold: at any speed setting Mercury laps Neptune the way it does in the sky, and pausing the orbits turns the scene into a diagram you can walk around. Clicking a planet fills the panel with its real figures, which is where the scale honesty matters - Jupiter's on-screen ball is a few times Earth's, but the panel tells you the real answer is about eleven times the diameter, and that the distances between orbits are compressed far more than the sizes are.

The black hole scene answers the question most people bring to it: if a black hole is black, what is the picture everyone has seen? The glowing ring is not the hole - it is the accretion disk, gas heated by friction as it spirals inward, and the scene animates the detail that makes disks physical: inner material orbits faster than outer material. The panel pairs that with the real numbers for the two best-known black holes and the rule of thumb that an event horizon spans roughly three kilometers of radius per solar mass.

The galaxy scene is about structure emerging from count. Individually the rendered points are nothing; at tens of thousands they become arms, a bar, a core with depth. Regenerating the spiral with a new arm count makes the parametric nature of the scene obvious - which is exactly why the page calls it art tuned to look right rather than a gravitational model - while the panel keeps the real Milky Way figures in view for contrast.

Using the scenes with a class or a curious kid

Each page works as a two-minute demonstration: fullscreen the scene on a projector, orbit it slowly while the panel is visible, and let the questions drive which object gets clicked next. Because everything renders locally, the pages behave the same on school hardware as at home - there is no stream to buffer and no account wall - and the honesty notes beside each scene give a natural opening for the difference between a visualization and a measurement, which is itself worth teaching.

The pages are free and load fast - the 3D engine downloads once and is then served from the browser cache. Fullscreen keeps the controls and facts panel visible, and Escape always returns to the page.