Past the Moon, kilometers stop meaning anything. The honest unit is how long the light took to reach you. Everything on this site is built at true scale with that clock running: a map you can scroll, a planet you can stand on, and a mission you can ride end to end.
Proxima Centauri, the nearest star after the Sun: 4 years and 3 months. Nothing on this site goes that far. Nothing we have built does either.
Scroll the whole thing at true scale and find out what the textbook poster was hiding. Every world at its real size, every moon, the belt as it actually is, and the five spacecraft that are leaving for good.
Stand on a planet where the sunset takes two tries, then walk with the habitable twilight band at a stroll. Real orbit, real star catalog, real terrain from MESSENGER, and a thermostat that finds the one perch where you can stop walking.
Twenty years in one scrubber, from launch to the last signal. Land on Titan in real time with two clocks a billion kilometers apart, then fly the slingshot route yourself with the real planets in the way.
Distance ticking up, signal power ticking down, and the date the last instrument goes quiet. In progress.
What this is. A small collection of interactive instruments about the solar system, built on one rule: when something on screen is not to scale, not computed, or not a photograph, it says so on the screen. Posters and textbooks have been quietly lying to you about how far apart things are. These pages do not.
Who. Made by Brandon Erickson, an eye surgeon in Oregon who builds things after clinic.
How. Each piece is one HTML file. No frameworks, no build step, no accounts, no tracking. Orbits come from published Keplerian elements, trajectories are integrated, stars are the Yale and HIPPARCOS catalogs, and surfaces are spacecraft mosaics. Written with Claude.
Why the name. Sunlight is eight minutes old by the time it reaches you. Saturn is an hour and a quarter behind. Voyager 1 is most of a day. Out there, the only honest ruler is a clock.