All eight worlds, riding a moving star. Drag to orbit the view.
The camera stays yours — drag and zoom while it flies. The clip downloads when the end date arrives.
Textbook orrery diagrams show planets looping around a fixed Sun. But the Sun is a passenger too: it orbits the centre of the Milky Way at roughly 230 km/s, completing one galactic year every 225–250 million years. Because all eight planets orbit a moving Sun, their true paths through space are helices — stretched spirals — not closed ellipses.
A famous viral animation drew the planets corkscrewing behind the Sun like a drill bit, with the orbits perpendicular to travel and the planets “dragged along in the Sun’s wake”. That’s wrong on both counts. The ecliptic is tilted roughly 60° to the Sun’s direction of travel, so the helix leans — and the planets are not dragged behind: for part of every orbit they are ahead of the Sun along its path. Switch between the modes above to compare the honest geometry with the myth.
Yes. The background is the real sky: 327 stars to magnitude 3.6, placed from Yale Bright Star Catalog positions, with the Milky Way’s band along the true galactic plane. The cyan arrow marks the Sun’s galactic direction of travel, toward Cygnus — look for Deneb sitting almost exactly on it, about 6° away. Southern-hemisphere observers can find the Southern Cross (Acrux, Mimosa, Gacrux) and the Pointers. The tilt of 60° isn’t assumed here — it falls straight out of the geometry: the travel direction sits at ecliptic latitude 59.6°. Separately, relative to nearby stars the Sun also drifts about 19 km/s toward the solar apex in Hercules, near Vega — a smaller motion, often confused with the galactic orbit itself.
Orbits are drawn circular and coplanar (real eccentricities and inclinations are small); periods and starting positions use each planet’s real values for today’s date. In Readable mode, orbital distances are gently compressed so Mercury and Neptune can share one view — switch to True AU for honest proportions. Planet sizes have three modes: Iconic (exaggerated; photographic NASA-derived surface maps turning on the true clock: one turn per sidereal day of simulated time, so Earth completes its honest 366¼ rotations per orbit, Jupiter races through 10-hour days, and Venus creeps backwards. Slow the Time slider to about one day per second to watch a single day pass; run time faster and each surface fades to its spin-averaged bands — the long exposure of a day no eye could follow. All lit from the Sun’s actual direction), Comparative (true proportions relative to each other, magnified ×1,650 — see Jupiter’s real dominance; the Sun is capped or it would swallow Mercury’s orbit), and True (honest angular size — every world shrinks below a single pixel, because the solar system is almost entirely empty space). The travel-speed slider is compressed by default; at the Sun’s honest 48.5 AU per year the helix stretches almost straight. Press TRUE and see for yourself.
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