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!

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?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!

So cool and impressive. Very well made.

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.

[dead]

[dead]

Fuck your stupid project.