Welcome to my Orbits animation project.

It can take quite a few seconds for all the images to load, including the 25 Mb high resolution image of the Milky Way by Serge Brunier at ESO to load and render.
The planetary orbits are computed using Paul Schlyter's algorithms.

Some tips:

Use the left mouse button to pan your view left/right, up/down.
Click on the Scale +/- buttons to change the scale. Defaults to 1024 X normal size (with the sun at 1/100th normal size so it doesn't swamp the view)
Click on the Dist +/- buttons to change the camera distance from the sun. Defaults to 1.6 Astronomisal Units (Earth's orbital distance.)
Use the blue chevrons to control the replay speed and direction.
Enter a date in the Start Date box to re-visit times gone by, try Capt. Cook's transit of Venus on Jun 3 1769 (1769-06-03).

The view initially centres on the sun, and as you pan around the screen your view target on the Celestial Sphere changes and its position is indicated by the yellow dot on the small oval image.

NEW!
Click to explore the names of planets and moons, constellation names and boundaries.

The "Choose view centre" dropdown menu changes the centre of the view to the selected body. Check out the Moon, Saturn's rings, Jupiter's spot, and soon, Jupiter's moons.

The distance between the centre of the bodies (sun and planets) remains to scale with your viewing distance.

The axes of rotation and rotation speeds of the bodies is accurate.

Click on this text box to make it go away once the stars and Milky way appear.