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Meteor showers
The Sun and space weather
The Oort cloud is always drawn: zoom out past the planets to see it. It is a model; it has never been observed directly.
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The night sky
The stars visible to the naked eye are drawn where they really are: the sky behind Earth's night side is the sky people there see overhead. Hover over a star for its name and distance.
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Positions from JPL Horizons. Earth imagery: NASA. Planet and moon maps: NASA/USGS Astrogeology; Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Venus's clouds from Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0). Nearby stars: the HYG database v4.1 (CC BY-SA 4.0), with recent brown dwarfs and Gaia distances added inside 10 light-years. It holds about 4,000 of the roughly 10,000 objects thought to lie within 100 light-years (the rest are faint red, white and brown dwarfs), and beyond that the naked-eye stars, whose Hipparcos distances grow rough past 2,000 light-years. Constellation figures: the "modern" sky culture of Stellarium (CC BY-SA 4.0), with distances and their uncertainties from the Hipparcos new reduction (van Leeuwen 2007). Planets and the stars that host them: the NASA Exoplanet Archive. The Milky Way is a model: spiral arms from Reid et al. (2019), measured by parallax to star-forming regions (brighter where measured, fainter where extrapolated); the bar after Wegg, Gerhard & Portail (2015). Bodies, orbits and distances are to scale with each other; the dots are signposts, not sizes.
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