A Solar system navigator, with a timeline and real scale
This morning the live globe got a joke button that folds the Earth out into the Solar system and shows where the Tesla Roadster is. The first question after it went up was the obvious one: can I see it at real scale? On the globe the answer stays no, because that view is there to make you smile and then fly you back to the Earth. So the real-scale version now has a page of its own: the Solar system navigator.
Two scales
Readable is the view you know from the globe. Directions are real, distances from the Sun are squeezed and every body is drawn far bigger than it is, so the inner planets and Neptune fit on one screen.
Real uses true distances and true sizes. The Sun becomes a small bright dot, the Earth disappears into a marker, and the Moon is a hair's width from the Earth. Switch between the two and everything slides from one layout to the other, so you can watch the Solar system stretch out. Every body keeps a marker and a label of the same size on screen, so even at real scale you can still find and click the Earth.
Click anything
Each body opens a card: how far it is from the Earth and from the Sun, how long light takes to reach us, how fast it moves round the Sun, its diameter, the length of its year and day, and how many moons it has. The numbers come from NASA fact sheets, and the card links to NASA's page for that body. The Roadster card shows its speed, the launch date and how many times it has gone round the Sun, with links to JPL Horizons and to whereisroadster.com. Centre here keeps the camera on that body while time moves.
Move time
Under the view there is a slider from 2000 to 2049. Drag it and the planets move to where they were, or will be, on that date. Play runs time forward at a day, a week, a month or a year per second. Play the last year jumps back twelve months and replays them at a month per second, then stops at today. Before February 2018 the Roadster is not there, and its card says it is still on the ground.
The car's path is a table of orbital elements from NASA's JPL Horizons, from launch to 2050, stored with the site. Checked against Horizons positions, the page puts the car within about 16 km of where JPL says it is. The planets use JPL's published approximate orbits, which are good from 1800 to 2050, which is why the slider stops there.
If you run an ADS-B or AIS receiver, you can put your own station on the globe too: the setup is on the feeder page.
Update, same day. The page now also tells you where everything is today, in words: how far the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are from the Earth and how long their light takes to reach us, where the Roadster is and how many times it has gone round the Sun, and when it next comes close to us (about 4.8 million km in January 2047). There is a short FAQ under the view, in all twelve of the site's languages, and a shared link now unfurls as a picture of the orbits with today's positions and the Roadster in red.
Update, later the same day. Three changes after the first comments. The Roadster now has an off switch that stays off: untick it once and the car, its orbit and its place in the Centre list are gone the next time you open the page, which suits anyone who came for the planets and not the joke. A link can do the same with ?roadster=0. The planets also got real surfaces. The new Planets menu has three looks: photo maps of every body (Jupiter's bands, the Martian dust, the Earth's continents, Saturn's rings in its own equatorial plane, each planet leaning by its real axial tilt), the plain colours from this morning, and a line drawing we made ourselves. The photo maps are by Solar System Scope and published under CC BY 4.0, so their credit sits in the corner of the map whenever that look is on, and in the sources section below. Your choice is remembered, and ?look=flat or ?look=sketch opens a page in that look.
Update, evening. The planets now turn the way the real ones do. Each body's pole points where it actually points in the sky, and each one spins at its real rate from the official rotation models of the International Astronomical Union. So the photo maps are no longer pinned at a random angle. The Earth shows day where it is day: open the page at noon UTC and Africa faces the Sun, at midnight UTC it is the Pacific. The Moon keeps its near side towards the Earth, with the small wobble it really has. Venus turns backwards, slowly. Uranus lies on its side and points a pole at the Sun when it did in 1986. Saturn's rings open and close as seen from the Earth: edge-on in March 2025, wide open again by the early 2030s. Press Play and you can watch the Earth spin through its days while it goes round the Sun. The globe's Roadster view got the same treatment. We checked the numbers against events with known answers, for example where the Sun stands overhead on the solstices and the date the rings went edge-on.
Update, night. A new Axes switch next to Orbits draws each body's spin axis, with the north end in amber, and a faint line round its equator. It makes the tilts readable at a glance instead of only from the texture: the Earth leans by 23 degrees, Jupiter stands almost straight, Uranus lies on its side, and Saturn's equator is its ring. Venus keeps its north pole up and spins backwards around it, which is how astronomers define its north. The switch is off by default, is remembered once you turn it on, and ?axes=1 opens a page with it on.