MENTIFABERThe workshop · drawn at night
Sheet
18 / 41
Grid
MF-03·03
Drawn
Anders
Date
28.10.2026
Fig. 1 · Cartograph, on the bench: power it on to run it hereMF-03·03

01Why it exists

Everything, where it actually is

Most space maps are posters: pretty, flat, and quietly wrong about where things are. Cartograph puts every object at its measured position (right ascension, declination and distance, turned into galactic coordinates) and lets you walk out from the planets to the first galaxies, one scale at a time. Each object carries a card with its numbers and where they came from: Gaia, Hubble, JWST, the Event Horizon Telescope, NICER.

02Parts list

  1. Solar SystemThe planets and dwarf planets where they are today, from JPL's mean orbital elements. Run time forward at a day, a month or a year a second, or switch to true scale to feel the emptiness.
  2. Neighbours, bright stars, exoplanetsEvery star system within 13 light-years at true scale, then the famous stars, then the planetary systems that changed the field: 51 Pegasi, TRAPPIST-1, WASP-39 and K2-18.
  3. Remnants, nebulae, the Milky WayBlack holes from Gaia BH1 to Sagittarius A*, pulsars, magnetars, stellar nurseries and clusters, then the whole Galaxy from outside, with everything plotted at its true distance from the Sun.
  4. Local Group, deep space, Earth orbitAndromeda and the dwarfs, out to M87, the first quasar and JWST's most distant galaxies. Then back home: live satellites propagated with SGP4, the same engine Overhead uses.

03Instruments

Moon
 
 
ISS
 
 
Space weather
 
 

04Construction

How it's drawn

No WebGL and no library: a 2D canvas with a small perspective camera, glow sprites and a few thousand background stars. That keeps it light on a phone and lets it open offline. Positions are converted from J2000 equatorial coordinates with the standard galactic rotation matrix, so Sagittarius A* lands within a tenth of a degree of the Galactic Centre.

Views that span many powers of ten use a logarithmic radius and label their grid rings, so the scale is never hidden.

Canvas 2DJPL mean elementsJ2000 → galacticSGP4

Sibling to overhead

Overhead follows one satellite in real time. Cartograph is the wide view of everything else, and its Earth-orbit view shares Overhead's propagation and element sets.

05Tolerances

Values are rounded, and a contested distance (Betelgeuse, Deneb, Rigel) is given as a range rather than one confident number. Beyond about a billion light-years distances are light-travel time, not where those galaxies are now. The Milky Way's spiral arms are schematic; nobody has a clean photograph of them from outside. Dwarf-planet positions come from approximate elements and are good to a few degrees. Rebuilt from scratch in this revamp: 140+ objects and ten views, with more to come as they're checked.

what it is not, said plainly

06Inscription

Start at today's Earth and keep zooming out. It doesn't end where the poster did.

07The same room