Stars
Star positions, apparent magnitudes and color indices: HYG database 4.0, David Nash / Astronexus. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
The local star data is a modified subset: stars through magnitude 9, converted into directions and display colors. This derived dataset is also available under CC BY-SA 4.0. It contains 83,479 stars. The catalog uses J2000 equatorial coordinates. The default view is composed for this site; See your sky reorients the stars for a chosen place and the current time. This is an idealized rendering, not a camera feed.
Milky Way
Deep Star Maps 2020, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Ernie Wright. The original visualization plots data from the Hipparcos, Tycho and Gaia catalogs.
The faint-star map is reduced to a spherical color mesh for the soft light of the Milky Way. The live renderer draws that mesh and individual star points. Brightness, color, camera framing and the optical size of stars are artistic display choices. The cloud structure is a two-dimensional sky distribution, not a three-dimensional reconstruction of interstellar dust.
Earth
Blue Marble Next Generation, NASA Earth Observatory, Reto Stöckli. January 2004 surface mosaic, mapped onto the lit Earth used during the cat game.
NASA imagery and data do not imply NASA endorsement.
