Point of Reference

Space in every new tab. See where the planets really are, the Moon's phase tonight, and the next eclipse.

Every new tab becomes a live window on space. The positions are real. Open a tab and the Moon sits at the phase it's at outside your window right now, the planets are at the angles they actually occupy today, and the next eclipse has a real date attached to it. WHAT YOU GET Earth and the Moon — Watch the Moon swing around Earth on its tilted orbit, lit from the real direction of the Sun. That tilt is why eclipses are rare: the Moon usually passes above or below Earth's shadow, and only lines up a few times a year. When it does, you'll see it turn deep copper-red. The app tells you when the next one is, and can jump you forward to watch it. The solar system — All eight planets where they genuinely are today. Then switch your viewpoint from the Sun to the Earth and watch what happens: the tidy circles become loops. That's retrograde motion, the thing that puzzled astronomers for 1,500 years. Mars appears to reverse direction for about eleven weeks every couple of years. Nothing about Mars changes — only where you're standing when you look. Jupiter and its moons — The four moons Galileo spotted in 1610, strung out the way they look through a telescope. They're locked in a rhythm, so you can watch them slide in front of Jupiter, cast shadows on its clouds, and vanish into its shade. HOW TO USE IT Click anything to look at it closely. Drag to spin the view, scroll to zoom. Speed up time from real-time to five years a second and watch centuries of orbits go by. QUIET BY DESIGN No permissions. No sign-in. No ads, no tracking, nothing collected, no network connection of any kind — it works on a plane. Everything is drawn from scratch in code, so the whole thing is about 45 KB. A NOTE ON ACCURACY Planet positions come from NASA JPL's orbital data. The Moon's position is accurate to a fraction of a degree, so eclipse timings land within about an hour of reality. Sizes and distances are scaled for visibility — space is mostly empty, and at true scale every planet would be smaller than a pixel. Positions, phases, and eclipse timing are not exaggerated.