Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer

Hello, I am the creator and maintainer of Stellarium Mobile. I have been working in my free time for about a year on this new project Galaxium, that is more about traveling in the universe rather than looking at the sky from Earth. It is still experimental, and at the moment I am not sure what it will become. Feedback is welcome.

Amazing work! I've been actually working on a solar system / gravity sim for my son who has been getting a lot of enjoyment out of the PhET gravity/orbit sims, that has some overlap with your project. It's up at https://newtonsorchard.app

I haven't put nearly as much time into my project as you've put into yours - Galaxium is really polished and impressive. Well done!

I had to login just to upvote

I thought it was limited to the solar system until I accidentally kept zooming out, and got my mind blown a couple of times. And again when I saw the black hole.

This is ridiculously well made

Super cool project! These kinds of viewers seem to pop up every few days, but this one is the best one so far. For feedback, I found it a bit odd that when selecting Sombrero Galaxy for example it zooms to the black hole M104 at the center of it, and actually viewing the entire galaxy then requires several mouse wheel spins :) Otherwise, great stuff.

9.336 WGPU Error: Not enough memory left.

This is on a 4GB 1650 Super, latest Firefox, Win10. It's an old card, sure, but it can still play most commercial games; I'm not sure why this thing is so hungry. Lots of big volumetric textures, maybe?

Very awesome. FYI Voyager(1,2) should be oriented with the big antenna dish pointed towards Earth.

It's cool! Recently I built a space explorer-like WebGPU project inspired by Space Engine the game, and your implementation runs smooth with rich visuals, that's far superior to mine.

I do find it sometimes hard to navigate and has some visual glitches, but man it is good. I hope one day it becomes my go-to for space exploring, since Space Engine is Windows only and it does not run on my Mac. And building the space must be a huge amount of work, there's so much that has to go into it.

This is a lovely way to explore the sights!

My feedback:

1. I wish the time scaling was persistent; I wanted to jump between solar system objects while keeping the accelerated time. A way to persist the scale would be lovely (maybe a slider in the header).

2. Pinning the object selector would be nice, too. It took me a minute to realize I could focus the text input to show the object selector again.

Hi, This is awesome to show to kids too as well. I was showing this to my 5 year old that this is earth, sun and moon this is where we are now.

The earth rotation is probably not correct, I am in UK and sun has not set yet, but in Galaxium it is showing night in UK.

Why do you block mobile devices? When I selected "desktop site" to bypass that it works fine, although the UI is a bit small.

Gee... That's fucking insane! I like it!

Btw, how many hours do you have in a day to build a non-commercial beta like this in just a year?! :D

I found several issues: 1. Selecting Voyagers and swam back in time: • The Sun was leaving a strange trace of light while moving backward through space; • When voyagers reached the Earth in 1977, they ricocheted from it and flew back into space; • When I changed the selected target during the time simulation, it stopped and lost its simulation speed 2. I can't move my cursor with arrows or Cmd | Option + <> combinations in the "Ask AI" input field

And a few thoughts from me: • You missed the favicon =) • Behavior, when you first should click on the object and then click "center" to fly to it, is a bit counterintuitive and confusing. I personally expected scroll target changes automatically when I clicked to a different object • What do you think about adding the same scale across the whole Universe (esp. in the local stars group) that the Local Group has with vertical lines from the plane of the ecliptic? • Should you add a few more DSO objects like TON 618 in the "Featured" catalog?

It’d be interesting to hear how you see this evolving and what the original idea was. Are you trying to compete with other universe exploration apps, or build it more like a browser-based atlas of the Universe?

Galaxium can't run in this browser Galaxium uses WebGPU, a recent browser technology that isn't available or enabled here. It works in up-to-date versions of Chrome, Edge, Safari (macOS 26+) and Firefox, on a computer with hardware graphics.

In the meantime, you can explore the night sky at stellarium-web.org — it runs in any browser.

You borked it.

Very impressive. Love the motion blur on stars as you move around and fascinating to toggle on asteroids to see how busy our solar system really is.

This looks great, amazing job! Love the motion blur effect.

Galaxium can't run in this browser

This is very cool! Is this tracking real time locations?

Wow! I'm utterly speechless.

I love space "browsers" - I lose myself in them, just clicking through all the entities.

Also TIL that there are satellite galaxies, and I've never noticed those on other toys/tools like this. I always though Andromeda was the closest galaxy, but it is FAR away compared to `Sgr dSph` which is within 50kly from the center of the Milky Way.

How much data is loaded here?

Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!

So cool and impressive. Very well made.

is it based on WASM？

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Fuck your stupid project.