An interactive map of the Sun's stellar neighborhood: the star systems within about 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years), drawn in three dimensions and set in motion. A time slider moves every star along its space velocity from 100,000 years in the past to 100,000 years in the future, so the changing order of nearest neighbors can be watched as it happens.
What it shows
- Four views of the same data. A perspective 3D view, a top-down view of the X-Y plane, an edge-on view of the X-Z plane, and an all-sky Aitoff projection of the directions as seen from the Sun. A note under each view explains what that projection preserves and what it discards: the top view loses height, the side view loses one horizontal axis, and the sky view keeps direction exactly but discards distance.
- Time. Positions are propagated in straight lines from each system's present position and space velocity, over a range of plus or minus 100,000 years. A readout tracks the nearest system at the current epoch, and the side panel re-sorts the list by distance as time runs.
- Overlays. Motion trails, distance rings at 5, 10, 20 and 30 light-years, the Voyager 1 and 2 probes on their present headings, and two "reach shells" of 4 and 8 light-years, the distances a craft at one tenth of the speed of light could cover within roughly a human lifetime (round trip and one way).
- Details. Selecting a system shows its distance now, its closest approach to the Sun within the time range and when it happens, its proper motion, radial velocity and luminosity, and a short note on what makes it interesting.
Data
The data are embedded in the page. The nearest systems (46 besides the Sun) take their positions, parallaxes and proper motions from the RECONS list of the nearest star systems (Research Consortium On Nearby Stars), with radial velocities from the HYG v4.1 compilation. A further 228 systems out to about 10 parsecs come from HYG v4.1. Distances follow from parallax, and space velocities combine proper motion, distance and radial velocity. In all the page lists 274 systems besides the Sun (its header says 276).
Limitations
- Straight-line motion. Stars move at constant velocity. Gravity, binary orbits and the curvature of orbits around the galaxy are not modeled, which is a fair approximation over a few tens of thousands of years and a rougher one at the ends of the 100,000-year range.
- Missing radial velocities. Systems without a measured radial velocity (93 of the 228 drawn from HYG) move only across the sky, not toward or away from the Sun. They are drawn faded and have no trails.
- Approximate values. A few objects carry approximate astrometry or radial velocities, as the page's source notes say: Teegarden's Star, the two brown dwarfs Luhman 16 and WISE 0855-0714, and stars where an older catalog value was replaced by a modern measurement.
- Sizes are not to scale. Dot size follows luminosity (or apparent brightness in the sky view) for legibility only.
- The per-star notes are short summaries written for the page, not sourced astronomy; check them against the literature before relying on them.
How it was made
Claude (Anthropic) built the page as a single self-contained HTML file in a conversation with the site owner in September 2026, using plain JavaScript and a 2D canvas with no libraries. It is shown here as it was made.