Credits & licences

The Solar System is written and designed by Michael Antebi. The surface maps, the sky, the rendering library and the typefaces come from the sources below, used under the licences stated. Everything is served from this site; nothing is fetched from elsewhere while you use it.

Planet and moon surface maps — Solar System Scope

Maps of the Sun, Mercury, Venus (cloud deck), Earth (day, night and clouds), the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and its rings, and Uranus are from the Solar System Scope texture library.

Changes made for this site: the maps were resized (2048×1024 for desktop, 1024×512 for phones) and converted to WebP; the Earth cloud map was turned into a transparency mask and an ocean-gloss mask was derived from the Earth day map; the Saturn ring profile was resampled. The maps are otherwise unaltered.

Planet and moon surface maps — NASA

Maps of Mars, Neptune, Pluto and Charon, and of the moons Phobos, Deimos, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Iapetus, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon and Triton are from NASA's 3D Resources collection (NASA / JPL-Caltech / USGS mission imagery), which is not subject to copyright in the United States. Courtesy of NASA. NASA does not endorse this site.

Changes made for this site: resized and converted to WebP; Mars's contrast and saturation lifted slightly; on mosaics that cover only the hemisphere a spacecraft photographed (Triton, the five moons of Uranus, part of Iapetus, small polar gaps on Io, Mimas, Europa and Ganymede) the unmapped area was filled with texture synthesised from the mapped part of the same moon; a few greyscale mosaics were tinted toward the moon's known colour.

The sky

Milky Way and background sky: NASA's Tycho all-sky map, from the same 3D Resources collection (not subject to copyright in the United States). Softened and tone-mapped; its individual stars were removed because the catalogue below draws them.
Stars: the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, 5th revised edition (Hoffleit, D. & Warren, W. H. Jr., 1991; CDS catalogue V/50): 9,096 stars with positions, visual magnitudes and B−V colour.

Data

Planetary facts and distances are from NASA's planetary fact sheets (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, National Space Science Data Center).

Software

three.js — Copyright © 2010–2021 Three.js Authors. Released under the MIT License: permission is granted, free of charge, to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense and/or sell copies of the software, subject to the inclusion of the copyright and permission notice, and the software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind.

Typefaces

Both are used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 and are embedded in the page rather than loaded from a font service.