Cosmic Specks vs RealTime Space

Space is almost all empty. That turns out to be the beautiful part. Every picture of the solar system you've ever seen tells you small white lies. The planets are swollen so you can see them. The orbits are squashed flat and drawn as tidy circles. Everything is crowded together so it fits on the page. Cosmic Specks is the same solar system with the lies switched off, one at a time, so you can build an intuition for what was actually removed. IT OPENS WITH THE ARGUMENT. A ninety-second tour names the five lies and switches each one off, live: the sizes, the flatness, the circles, the stillness, the diagram eclipses. IT ISN'T FLAT. Turn on inclinations and the orbits fan out into the tilted planes they really occupy — Pluto's 17°, Mercury's 7°, the quiet disagreement the flat diagram hides. EVERYTHING SPINS. Each body turns on its own axis, at its own rate, at its own lean: Venus backwards, Uranus on its side, the Moon locked forever facing home. HALLEY'S COMET TAKES AN EPIC RUN. Seventy-six years, out past Neptune and back, on an orbit so long and lopsided it barely belongs on the same diagram. SWIM THROUGH TIME. Watch conjunctions close, planets loop backwards through retrograde, Saturn's rings turn edge-on and all but vanish, Venus cross the face of the Sun. JUMP TO A PRECISE ECLIPSE and see how tight the Moon's shadow really is — a couple of hundred kilometres of darkness, brushing over the Earth for a few minutes, landing on the real map where it really lands. On 2 August 2027 it crosses southern Spain and Egypt; jump there and watch. And when you want the honest picture of size: one tap drops everything to true scale, where the planets become the specks they are, and the emptiness is the whole photograph. HONEST BY CONSTRUCTION. Every solar-system app draws a picture; this one also shows you the picture's error. Bodies are enlarged so you can see them at all — and the exact factors are printed on screen the entire time you're looking (Sun ×24, bodies ≤×750). Positions are computed on your device from orbital elements, so the app also tells you when it stops being trustworthy: good near today, approximate centuries out, illustrative in the deep millennia. Even the maps admit their gaps: Miranda is half blank because humanity has only ever seen half of it. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO. No account. No ads. No subscription. No analytics — App Privacy is "Data Not Collected". Nothing leaves your phone. Free, with one optional purchase that opens 10,000 years in each direction.

Strap in. RealTime Space puts you at the helm of your own starship in a photoreal, full-scale universe — every planet, every major moon, and 8,920 real stars, all in the palm of your hand. FLY ANYWHERE Real navigation physics with thrust, drift and 100x warp. Skim Jupiter's storms, cruise through Saturn's sunlit rings, chase comets across the system, or point the nose at a star and just go. A REAL SKY Every star you see is real — 8,920 naked-eye stars with their true names, brightness and 3D positions, plus the Milky Way band exactly where it belongs. Fly to Sirius, Betelgeuse or Vega and watch a point of light resolve into a blazing sun. THE WHOLE SOLAR SYSTEM All eight planets in photoreal detail, the Moon, volcanic Io, icy Europa, hazy Titan, Enceladus and its geysers, the asteroid belt, famous comets, deep-space nebulae — and Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the galaxy. THREE WAYS TO FLY VISOR — a clean, unobstructed view of space. HELM — a full cockpit around you. CHASE — follow your own ship from behind. SCAN AND DISCOVER Scan planets, moons and stars to fill your Field Guide, track your journey on the Space Map, and complete missions as you explore. MADE TO FEEL REAL Analytic eclipse and ring shadows, real star colors, a procedural engine soundscape, and a sky accurate enough to learn constellations from. FREE FOR 60 DAYS Everything is free for your first 60 days. Keep the whole universe forever with a single $1.99 unlock — no subscription, no ads, no account, no data collection. WORKS WITH VOICEOVER Every control is labeled — thrust, warp, the joystick, the camera views and the fly-to list — so the ship can be flown with a screen reader turned on.