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Pax Abyssi

Galaxy map // 119,624 catalogue stars

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Limit
m --
Stars
0

Using the galaxy map

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Search stars
Drag
Orbit (right drag or two fingers: pan)
Wheel, pinch, + and -
Zoom toward the pointer
Arrow keys
Orbit
Click, tap
Select a star; double-click flies to it
C
Centre on the selection
O
Open the selection's system in the orrery
H, T, S, G
Home, top view, side view, whole galaxy
F
Filters and layers
Esc
Clear the selection

Stars are drawn as they would look from the camera: brightness and size follow each star's apparent magnitude from where you are, down to a limiting magnitude (now m 11.0) that follows the zoom. Colour is the star's temperature seen as a blackbody. Turn on “Every star the same size” in Filters to see the whole catalogue as dots.

Positions are heliocentric Galactic coordinates from HYG v3 with Gaia DR3 corrections. The grid lies in the Galactic plane through the Sun; l is Galactic longitude.

About this map

The sky Earth has catalogued, in three dimensions

Every one of the 119,624 stars with a position in the game's corrected HYG catalogue is drawn at its measured distance, coloured by its temperature and as bright as it would look from where you stand. The catalogue is nearly complete within about 25 parsecs of the Sun and holds under a tenth of the real stars beyond 80: that edge is Earth's telescopes, not the galaxy.

The 5,169 stars of the naked-eye sky carry full star sheets and generated planetary systems you can open in the orrery. Values are tagged Measured, Derived or Sim, so you can always tell an observation from the simulation.

In the game

Data credits

Star data derive from the HYG Database (David Nash, astronexus.com), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, compiling Hipparcos, the Yale Bright Star Catalog and the Gliese Catalog, with corrections from Gaia DR3 (ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO), XHIP (Anderson and Francis 2012) and WDS (US Naval Observatory). Known exoplanets: NASA Exoplanet Archive. The Milky Way backdrop is rendered from the game's model (Reid et al. 2019 arms, Hunter et al. 2024, Juric et al. 2008 disc).

Full attribution and licence