Cosmic Specks vs Planet

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.

Planet turns the solar system into something you can hold, spin, and poke at. Built for curious minds of all ages, it trades walls of text for things you can actually touch: drag through the orbits, tap a world to open it up, and see the real numbers behind it. EXPLORE THE SOLAR SYSTEM Pinch to zoom and drag to pan across the planets in their orbits. Tap any planet — or the Sun — to open its details: diameter, distance from the Sun, day length, and a short description. Then open it as an interactive 3D model you can turn in your hands. BROWSE AND SEARCH Every planet, the Sun, 20 notable moons, and a full overview of the solar system itself — how it formed, what's in it, and where we sit in the Milky Way. Search across all of it: type "Olympus" and you'll land on Mars. MOONS Titan's lakes of liquid methane. Enceladus firing geysers of water into space. Io, the most volcanic world we know. Ganymede, bigger than Mercury. Triton, orbiting backwards because Neptune caught it. COMPARE Put two worlds side by side and watch the scale land. Diameter, distance, day length, year length, gravity, and moons — drawn to their true relative size. Line Earth up against the Sun and see what 109 times wider actually looks like. TEST YOURSELF 135 questions, ten per round, drawn fresh every time. Every answer comes with a one-line explanation of why it's right, so a wrong guess teaches you something. Miss a few and you'll get them back at the end, with the reasons, to review. WEIGH IN, ANYWHERE Enter your weight and see what you'd weigh on every other planet — in kilograms or pounds. Enter your age and find out how many laps of the Sun you'd have made on Mars, or Neptune. SEE THEM IN 3D Load a detailed 3D model of any planet, spin it, and get close. ENGLISH AND PERSIAN Fully translated, including every article and quiz question. Switch language any time in Settings. No accounts. No ads. No data collected. Just the solar system.