Orbital Atlas

Public orbital data is dense, beautiful, and almost impossible to read. Orbital Atlas is an attempt to make it physical. The brief: build a browser tool that lets someone understand scale, distance, and time without reading a single table.

The audience is curious, not necessarily scientific. The interface needed to reward a five-second visit and still hold up for someone who wants to inspect a single object's path.

Each object is an instanced point with its own orbital path, altitude, and velocity. A time scrubber moves the whole system through a 24-hour window. The camera can pull back to a full system view or lock onto a single object.

Labels are HTML, not canvas, so they stay crisp and accessible. A custom shader fades orbit trails with age and altitude, giving the field depth without a heavy post-processing stack.

The renderer uses GPU instancing for the object field and a separate line pass for orbit trails. A custom shader fades the trails with age and altitude. The interface is keyboard-accessible: arrow keys move time, and the search field jumps to an object.

Data is bundled at build time, so there are no API keys or live network dependencies. The scene degrades to a flat map on devices without WebGL and respects reduced-motion preferences.