Macdara Ó Murchú

App

Cosmos Collective

This is a website that literally no one visits. I keep developing it as a way to learn about the solar system, the stars and the mind-bending science advancing modern astronomy.

cosmos-collective.com.au

The Sun and planets with five-year trails behind them. The inner planets' trails coil into spirals as the Sun carries them forward, and the outer planets' trails run out as long arcs.

#How it’s built

A diagram of every data source behind Cosmos Collective. The visitor's browser calls five services directly: Aladin Lite for the sky map, an ISS position service, NOAA space weather X-ray data, Launch Library 2 for launches, and Wikimedia Commons for spacecraft images. The browser also loads the Next.js app on Vercel, which fetches from NASA's asteroid feed, ALeRCE supernova alerts, NASA GCN circulars and the NASA Exoplanet Archive through its own API routes. A Vercel cron job runs every two hours, fetching the active-satellite list from CelesTrak and storing it in Vercel Blob. The app reads satellites from Blob, and loads telescope images from the NASA Image Library and the ESA/Webb CDN.