asterank

I built http://www.asterank.com/ and still maintain it after its acquisition by Planetary Resources. It is open source and its code has been used in a surprising number of space-related projects. If you're interested in getting involved, you might help modify the Asterank engine to be a better general-purpose framework for 3D space visualizations. This would benefit the space community as a whole by making the project a lot easier to adapt for commercial and educational purposes. Code: https://github.com/typpo/asterank I'm also on an open-source NASA grant where we're implementing web-based asteroid data analysis tools. It's a bit earlier stage but still room to get involved. Code: https://github.com/typpo/astrokit Email me (hn@ianww.com) if you want to talk about either of these!

Really like this. We're discovering new exoplanets so quickly. Wanted to share a similar webgl visualization I made, with colors that indicate the temperature range/habitability of the planet rather than spectral class: http://www.asterank.com/exoplanets Here's the source code: https://github.com/typpo/asterank/blob/master/static/js/3d/k...

I created this visualization that shows all exoplanets superimposed on our solar system with size, orbit, and temperature data: http://www.asterank.com/galaxies/ Here's the code that I use to suck down exoplanet data, which may be useful to you: https://github.com/typpo/asterank/blob/master/data/pipeline/...

Glad to see this on HN! Some friends and I are working on a fairly monolithic space game. Huuuuuge thanks to Ian Webster for posting his source [1] under a very permissive license (MIT). While I don't think our game will actually use his orbit shader code directly, it helped me back into the class of algorithms I need in order to generate solar systems with realistic orbits. https://github.com/typpo/asterank