AstroLabNew worlds, many ways to tell the sky’s stories
A major update to explore beyond the Sun, discover sky cultures and understand the Universe. This release brings together both strands of work from October 23.
Discover thumbnails now use captures of the actual renderer for black holes, films and refreshed planetary and libration views. Framing focuses on the subject, without controls or subtitles; useful educational diagrams are retained. The website uses the same images for collections, films, discovery pages and their sharing previews. The homepage brings a varied selection forward; the full journal, documentaries, and stars and galaxies have dedicated collections, with consistent durations and topics.
Embedded views keep their loading screen until the scene is ready, with a discreet signature that returns on touch. Three distinct playable scenes show stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the two suns of Kepler-16 and the turning sky with its constellations. Website sharing uses a landscape black hole capture and the title “The Universe at your fingertips”. Tutorial controls are highlighted again and window close buttons share one icon.
Halley can be explored down to its 3D nucleus, with stable tracking as time or display scales change. Its illustrative tails evolve with simulated time and freeze when paused. The card distinguishes physical dimensions from educational enlargement; the planetarium also lets you view the sky from the comet or a spacecraft.
Stellar life journeys start at the protostar with a phase timeline. Framing anticipates size changes, a gentle orbit accompanies playback, and a compact readout keeps age, speed and radius visible when controls fade. Ejecta remain around the star; their shape is illustrative. The Sun does not undergo a supernova. The presentation film uses the opening music and its Back button fades with the controls.
Ten asteroids join the catalogue with a card, a 3D shape and a narrated journey: Bennu, Ryugu, Itokawa, Eros, Toutatis, Apophis, Duende, 2005 YU55, 1998 OR2 and 2014 JO25. Four mission excerpts let you follow their spacecraft. Positions follow approximate calculated ellipses, with detailed data restricted to notable encounters; limitations are identified.
Create progressively reveals the story outline, planned scenes and completed stages with actual timings. A natural-language correction reruns the necessary stages: the previous film remains available until the new version is validated. The draft and request survive interruption. Mistral Medium 3.5 becomes the initial choice for new configurations; saved choices remain unchanged. Checks are stronger, but reviewing facts and rendered scenes is still useful before sharing a film.
Interactive view preparation is fixed. If creation fails, the screen identifies the stop, explains what is saved and lets you retry or edit the request and its format. Story and scenes remain permanently visible, without accordions or collapse controls; failure and recovery explanations use plain language, and reloading no longer presents a failure as ongoing creation.
The changing text and counter below artificial-satellite settings are removed: controls stay stable while positions update.
Stellar-life scenarios play in at most one minute. Framing keeps the whole disc between 30 and 70% of the shorter screen dimension, with a faster orbit. A grid calibrated in solar radii, astronomical units or kilometres makes scale changes readable; age and time speed remain visible.
Evolution scenes isolate the star: companions and orbits are hidden. The supernova reserves a wide shot for the flash and cloud before revealing the remnant. A shared size grid accompanies tracked bodies in close-up. It can be toggled in view settings or requested by a film shot. It measures the selected body’s size, not distances between bodies. Search releases the previous tracking before centring a new target; the solar halo now follows the apparent disc outline in off-centre close-ups.
Discovery continues after the film
A title screen accompanies loading, followed by a two-second pause before the first shot. A closing fade ends the screening without shortening shots or subtitles. When a film ends, its final view stays open and interactive. The player disappears; a compact prompt offers replay or a return to discoveries, with buttons contained within the mobile screen. Preferences saved before the film are preserved.
Featured offers a first-visit journey through small collections of three discoveries. Recent additions are distributed through the journey rather than placed first; variable stars are separated. A gold dot marks discoveries yet to open, then a check marks those already opened on this device. The Moon, missions, sky cultures, galaxies and experiments alternate as you scroll; topic and format filters remain available. Pinyin discreetly accompanies Chinese names, which no longer jump to the top of an empty search.
Sagittarius A* and M87* join the reference catalogue, search and Discover. Their two views and a short film use AstroLab’s renderer: background and thin-disk light is bent using precomputed tables loaded on demand. The Schwarzschild model does not represent black-hole spin; the disk, its orientation and the background are illustrative.
The teaching-size slider also applies to the black holes in Gaia BH1 and Sagittarius A*: optical rendering, selection and approach share the same display radius. Real sizes restores their physical radius; masses and periods remain unchanged. The distance slider now extends to strong logarithmic compression, with the S-star preset set slightly below the maximum. A readout beside the clock explains distorted distances and enlarged sizes, with factors relative to 1 AU.
Extrasolar-system presets now balance compression, framing margin and time speed according to their orbits. TRAPPIST-1 and WASP-76 keep their compression; 55 Cancri slows down so its inner planet can be followed. Sagittarius A* and M87* close-ups run their clocks three times faster to reveal disk motion.
Measured stars, invisible companions
Sagittarius A* gains documented S2, S29, S38 and S55 orbits. Gaia BH1 shows a star and a black hole orbiting their common centre of mass. No planets or glowing disk are invented; the ellipses are Keplerian and unknown sizes remain illustrative.
Each system has an explicit preset using AstroLab controls. Approaching a black hole uses the existing M87* optical renderer: Sagittarius A* retains an illustrative disk, while Gaia BH1 has no luminous disk. The optical pass also includes companion photospheres behind the black hole at finite distances: an alignment can produce arcs or a luminous ring. It reuses the same ray tables with a local surface approximation; teaching scales also distort the optical geometry. Orbits, labels and small targets remain accessible; discoveries do not replace saved preferences.
Nearby stars reuse the common solar surface and the catalogue colours. The three Cepheid views widen their framing, refresh their captures and accelerate their clocks to show cycles of roughly half a second to one second. Cepheid films accelerate time to reveal brightness changes without changing measured periods. Tutorials about invisible companions, variable stars and expansion now share the animations, sliders and pause controls of the other lessons.
Delta Cephei, Eta Aquilae and Zeta Geminorum now follow curves derived from Hipparcos observations. Views start at a speed that reveals their pulsation; the tutorial compares curves and periods. These historical data do not predict the exact present phase or measure the globes’ diameters.
Two new films connect these views to their tutorials. The pulse of stars has its own title and a thumbnail captured from the film. The solar-systems film includes Gaia BH1. The expansion film now combines multiple viewpoints, a fixed-camera comparison and the same interval from the present to 25 billion years around two galaxies; its tutorial distinguishes the Big Bang, scale factor, H(t) and H₀. Early points are model markers, not simulated galaxy formation.
The Universe at your fingertips becomes a 3 min 30 trailer: 21 discovery, measurement and feature shots, reused and accelerated with short captions.
The S stars · Gaia BH1 · Stellar curves · Understand expansion · The trailer
Creation saves its stages and resumes automatically after an interruption or return to the app. A discreet icon beside navigation replaces the progress banner. It stays within exploration views and disappears from tutorial menus, articles and film playback. A compact overview shows story, shot plan, framing and checks; details and editing open on demand, with actions always within reach. Review attempts up to two targeted corrections and flags unchanged output to prevent ineffective retries. In this workflow: errors identify the affected stage, continuation preserves earlier work, and each stage can be edited or regenerated. Pausing keeps the draft; starting over remains a separate choice. Estimated progress describes the active task and refines its duration using previous creations. Films use shared orbital framing that includes rings. Camera moves now follow the requested distance without being held back by limits inherited from the previous view. Creation explicitly selects the subject and initial angle; its catalogue distinguishes 3D views, animated experiments and static explanations.
HD 196885 now frames the entire system and both stellar orbits from a slightly inclined view. Galactic navigation follows continuous touch without a polar stop; around fifty named landmarks replace thousands of clickable points. The expansion film compares two map centres and shows the computed redshift palette while retreating.
Explore other systems and galaxies
Galactic exploration offers more selectable targets, even without labels, and a smaller default illustrative size. Close-ups share varied stellar populations; these points remain statistical illustrations. Stellar light markers stay small during approach before giving way to the stellar surface.
Close-ups distinguish five galaxy families and five named models: the Milky Way, M31, M33, M87 and the Large Magellanic Cloud. Illustrative detail loads progressively; stars and arms evolve at distinct speeds with the time wheel. Interstellar stars now share the planetarium’s brightness, sizes and halos, adjusted for distance. Interstellar and galactic journeys regain trails, forward aberration and approximate Doppler colours.
Seven extrasolar systems and nineteen planets: Kepler-16, Kepler-47, TRAPPIST-1, WASP-76, 55 Cancri, HD 80606 and HD 196885. In the latter, the planet accompanies one star of the pair (S-type), playing at 300 days/second. The time wheel now reaches 500 days/second. Binary stars, planets orbiting two suns, rocky worlds and highly eccentric orbits use the same engine as the Solar System.
Switching systems in settings keeps familiar gestures, camera controls, cards, measurements and tracking. Distance and size scales share the same controls, and even highly elongated ellipses remain smooth.
An atlas of roughly 19,900 galaxies lets you search, select and explore catalogue objects, measure distances and illustrate expansion. Orbital time, stellar motion and cosmological age remain separate.
Galaxy journeys now reuse interstellar gestures, camera controls, flights, object cards and the settings panel. The catalogue loads in small batches, with adjustable density. GPU-rendered galaxy shapes have an illustrative-size slider that preserves centres and measured distances. The Planck cosmic microwave background map appears by default in false colours, with a wider field to avoid an over-magnified appearance. It can still be turned off; galaxy framing is unchanged.
The picker distinguishes the Local Group, the Milky Way exterior and the Solar stellar neighborhood; the nearby-star catalogue does not represent the whole galaxy. Local Group anchors and notable galaxies retain readable names even when their centres overlap on screen. Distant galaxies remain lightweight points; approaching reveals illustrative cores, disks, arms and dust, with stable size and shape variety. These sizes are not derived from measured masses. The optional cosmic-background map follows viewing direction; its colours represent measured variations, not a naked-eye appearance.
Galaxy colours are illustrative by default; redshift palettes remain available as data maps. Approaching reveals a translucent volume: illustrative disk, arms, core and clusters change perspective as you orbit. Close-ups are no longer limited to a point’s screen size.
The cosmic microwave background has a brightness slider from 0 to 100%, set to 50% by default. The Planck map remains a false-colour representation, loaded on demand. Two new films explore galactic structure and cosmic expansion, including a Local Group comparison and a change of viewpoint.
Each system retains its own date and playback speed. Cosmic age and stellar epoch are separate from the solar calendar; long journeys no longer push it to 2050. Back and Forward restore visited views and their epochs. A Next arrow appears beside Back when a forward view is available; the framing button shifts to make room. Discover sits before AstroLab and its menu stays outside this history. Extrasolar orbits beyond 2050 remain illustrative Keplerian extrapolations without long-term evolution.
The galactic clock now reaches a cosmic age of 50 billion years, with numeric entry. Beyond the present, “ΛCDM projection” identifies theoretical expansion rather than a prediction of individual galaxies: their shapes and mergers are not simulated. Reference returns to today’s cosmic age, about 13.8 billion years.
Two suns, three planets · Explore TRAPPIST-1 · Open the atlas
Location widgets align above the clock without repeating the time. A nearby city and coordinates identify the selected Earth location; other worlds show the observing point coordinates. Tapping a widget keeps controls visible.
Two compact sliders now control daytime atmosphere and nighttime light pollution, with instant 0/100% toggles. Dim stars and the Milky Way fade as sky brightness increases. Films can animate these controls. Chosen brightness and an educational model, without automatic city measurements.
Films can keep a group of bodies framed while the camera moves, with caption margins. Earth–Moon shots in Earth seen from elsewhere, solar scales and alignments use this continuous framing.
Discover is subtly highlighted and the tutorial suggests starting with its views, films and guided journeys. During a film, Back remains in app navigation; Stop closes the film and Restart sits before Previous chapter.
Resolved sprites share the nearby volumes’ patterns with a gradual transition. Ellipticals retain a clearer core and a soft halo. Sizes remain illustrative; composed films use their own framing scale.
Illustrated constellations and sky cultures
25 Western illustrations by Johan Meuris / Stellarium are anchored to the stars: Orion, Draco, the Bears, Pisces… They are enabled by default in the planetarium and can be hidden in settings. Tap a name to open a card with its tradition, star count, framing and explicit locking. Framing leaves the view free; locking isolates and tracks the figure.
The sky also offers 312 Chinese asterisms, five Mexica figures and seven Tupi-Guarani figures. Five Mexica illustrations and five original Chinese drawings complement these selections. Names, sources, licences and reconstruction limits are documented: these selections do not claim to represent every tradition.
The Chinese drawings are contemporary interpretations, not historical reproductions. Layers and tracking work in films and saved views. The Constellations shortcut respects line and artwork choices made in settings.
Choosing an Earth location follows a compact flow: search or tap the map, nearby cities, then a fixed bottom Confirm action. Selection remains provisional until confirmed. The location widget gains a lightly translucent rounded surface.
In the AstroLab view, star intensity defaults to ×3, with a dedicated slider in star settings. The planetarium keeps its existing appearance. After an extreme zoom-out, pinching can move closer again without getting stuck. Travel trails remain visible at variable frame rates and stop with movement.
Films and viewpoints for discovery
The Voice-over button reads subtitles using an installed system voice in French or English. A male voice is preferred when available. No additional audio files to download in AstroLab. Voice startup is corrected for Safari on iPhone. Voice-over, subtitles and playback speed are remembered on this device. When reopening a started film, choose to start from the beginning or continue paused; resume and ending buttons include icons.
Two short films join the collection:
- Other ways to make a planetary system · 1 min 20 s.
- From neighbours to a galaxy map · 1 min 14 s.
The story One sky, many stories compares traditions and their ways of reading the stars. The two-minute general presentation offers a livelier journey through the app’s capabilities.
Discover offers composed portrait and landscape views: whole systems, a tracked binary star, a planetary viewpoint and galaxy journeys. You can return to free navigation.
- Track a Kepler-16 star · TRAPPIST-1 from planet e .
- Five Local Group landmarks · A field around NGC 4486B .
- An eclipse seen from the Moon · Mars from Phobos · Jupiter from Europa .
- Hubble around Earth and Artemis II around the Moon, with NASA/JPL trajectories.
The field around NGC 4486B is a spatial selection, not a measured cluster membership list. Illustrative landscapes and phases are identified.
After a discovery, Back restores the catalogue category and scroll position. For your creations, API keys remain saved through updates; models load automatically online, with Mistral by default and fallback choices per provider. The director can compose an original observation by choosing place, date and framing, or adapt an existing view.
During a film, camera or settings interaction gives you control. After four idle seconds, framing and settings ease back towards the current shot and cinematic movement resumes. Reframe with settings restores the intended display configuration. Films end with Replay and Exit actions. Tutorial highlight frames and unwanted touch-focus outlines are removed.
Music defaults to automatic mode, starting with Sleep and continuing through the other tracks. A film’s chosen soundtrack takes temporary priority; exiting restores the previous music and mode.
Earth sway brings Earth closer as seen from the Moon and identifies lunar libration. The reference frame stays fixed so its oscillation remains visible.
Understand, learn and find your way
25 expanded articles in French and English bring together explanations, discovery history, sourced anecdotes, exercises and further reading. All 25 topics are illustrated: a leading animated visual, shaded textured bodies, fine lines and compact sliders. Libration shows lunar surface detail; experiments retain all their settings, including in the enlarged dialog.
Lunar libration · Moon phases · Gravity assists
A user guide and detailed feature reference are available from the website and in-app help. The homepage brings together recent phone screenshots and constellation artwork, followed by tablet views, without cropping the images. A Milky Way backdrop and lightly frosted translucent panels bring the website closer to the app’s visual style. Navigation is lighter, with a menu linking directly to sections, features and updates. Films and screenshots use direct visual cards, without dropdowns or forced rotation; long pages have a screen-adapted table of contents. On phones, screenshots are more compact; discoveries use small thumbnails linking to complete collections. Secondary pages share the same layout, while film and view creation tools support the new layers and content.
More varied worlds, loaded as needed
The Sun and nearby stars retain their detailed surfaces with a visible luminous halo, including close-ups. The Sun casts a golden-yellow glow matching its illustrative surface, blending smoothly across the disc edge. Brightness is concentrated within the stellar surface and fades into the outer halo. Detailed mode adds local bloom and faint lens reflections; Standard mode remains more economical. Effects fade as a body covers the source and disappear at total occultation, including Earth hiding the Sun as seen from the Moon. The illustrative solar corona remains separate from these camera effects.
Planetary outlines in the sky are smoother, without an added coloured fringe. Constellation lines are finer and leave space around their stars in both ground and space views. Trails have softer edges, and the selected orbit stands apart from its surroundings. Galaxies, measurements and text retain their contrast without scene-wide bloom.
Views from a point on a globe gain subtle material detail: rock, ice, sea ripples and giant-planet cloud filaments. Available detailed maps load progressively. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune gain a thin close-up limb gradient modulated by sunlight, clearer on phones with a dedicated Jupiter close-up. These details are illustrative; giant planets have no solid ground.
The ten extrasolar stars have saved textures derived from the solar appearance and adapted to their known temperatures. The Sun keeps its rendering. Four new rocky surfaces — dark basalt, ochre, mineral and pale — distinguish the TRAPPIST-1 planets.
The new planet maps are limited to 1024 × 512 pixels, with 256 × 128 previews. Only previews needed for the current view are requested; detail loads on approach, with one detailed map active in GPU memory. These images are not downloaded at startup.
These extrasolar surfaces are illustrations: not resolved photographs or evidence of continents, oceans, ice or habitability. Their patterns are not measured features.
The Milky Way, Andromeda and M87 gain distinct volumes and documented articles in the existing reader. A bar and arms, a ring or an elliptical halo provide structural landmarks. The M87 article includes a credited EHT radio image. Other galaxies retain plausible, explicitly illustrative variants; these are not measured three-dimensional maps.
Stars in Astrolabe are easier to see. Pinching preserves orbital navigation, without automatically catching background stars. The cosmological background and system-view panorama are brought 15% closer. Location widgets use the clock surface style; Place and Date sit side by side in settings. Stellar motions load automatically, without a load button or a technical epoch field.
Galaxy names share the other celestial labels’ typography, with a light shadow for bright backgrounds. A measurement with one endpoint off-screen remains visible with an edge arrow; when both endpoints are off-screen, its drawing hides until one endpoint returns.
More reliable everyday details
Keyboard navigation respects wheel controls, keeps the active control visible and announces values more clearly. The catalogue can retry an interrupted load; filters, return navigation and galaxy framing are more consistent. Galaxy gestures follow portrait or landscape framing, and tapping inside a dialog’s edge no longer closes it.
Textures can recover after reconnection, and a full cache no longer blocks a resource available online. Shared links accept the epochs and playback speeds offered by the controls. Ancient dates, several English labels, personal music storage and merged learning experiments also receive targeted fixes.
Progressive loading and stability: progress and limits
Mobile rendering avoids repeated resets of the graphics surface. A paused sky stops redrawing unnecessarily; labels and graphics transfers also avoid repeated work, without reducing textures or detailed models. Heat and battery life still need checking on a physical device.
Images, cultural artwork and optional catalogues load on demand. Galaxy decoding runs in small reusable batches; obsolete tasks and detailed textures are released more carefully. Constellation artwork uses batched GPU rendering. Educational animations pause off-screen or in the background.
The initial download is lighter: the sky background matches its display resolution, and unused mapping resources have been removed. The cache preserves downloaded content and versions still used by open tabs.
Release notes and public pages open directly with the site’s styling. The offline cache no longer substitutes the application interface for them. The discreet “What’s new” link now lists major user releases, not every technical deployment.
Web release only. Automated checks and emulated mobile-browser journeys do not replace physical iPhone validation. Intermittent freezes remain open: this release does not claim to fix them all. No physical temperature or battery measurements are claimed.
Discover, one curiosity at a time
In the expansion film, cosmic time and camera orbital angular speed run three times faster, without shortening subtitle reading time. Catalogue discovery synopses let you share their link directly. During a film, Back fades with the controls and returns on interaction. Featured offers a varied selection of views and films. Segmented buttons select topics separating the Solar System, stars and galaxies, skies and cultures, explanations and missions. Initially no View, Film or Tutorial filter is selected, so all formats are visible. Selecting a format filters the list to that content; additional selections combine. Selecting all three also shows everything and keeps all three selected. Stars & galaxies brings its views and films together directly, including both films about galactic depth and expansion, without a submenu. Categories and thumbnails carry subtle icons. Reopening restores the category, filters, and vertical and horizontal scroll positions. Harmonised thumbnails favour AstroLab scenes and textured teaching diagrams.
Sources and licences · All releases
Continuous exploration and relativistic travel
Zoom out from a system into the stars and approach a known host to reveal its planets. Galaxies share the same gestures, time wheels and travel settings. Star arrivals are gradual, with framing adapted to their size. An approached star joins the orbital engine as a one-body system; Track lets you orbit its textured sphere and see its different sides. Zooming out preserves your constellation and background choices. Aberration eases in and out; illustrative galaxy colours remain visible. At 50% of c by default, observe directional aberration and approximate Doppler colours; time advancement can be disabled. Also discover Delta Cephei and the illustrative active nucleus of 3C 273.
Stellar surfaces, galaxy shapes and trails remain illustrative. Solar ephemerides are bounded to 1800–2050; travel duration remains an estimate separate from that range. Catalogued redshift remains an Earth-observed data map. A second map computes cosmological redshift from your position using the same comparative blue-to-red palette, separately from travel Doppler. Galaxies have stable spatial orientations, sourced for the M31 and M33 disks and illustrative otherwise. Their size factor ranges from 1 to 50, initially 10.
One location picker connects the represented universe, galaxies, available systems and observing locations. Place and time readouts open their pickers directly. Stellar arrivals restore the illustrative scale chosen for each system. In the galaxy view, the time wheel and Play directly control expansion; the earliest epochs are identified as outside today’s catalogue representation.
In the planetarium, the four giant planets have illustrative horizon haze, controlled by Daytime atmosphere. Back from Discover restores the list scroll. Films remember progress on this device and offer Restart before Previous chapter, Stop to exit the film, and Back to the catalogue within their controls. Orbital tracking now separates the position anchor from the gaze: track Earth, then tap the Moon and choose Observe. Earth stays fixed on screen, including after panning; the camera orbits it with the direction to the Moon. Framing remains adjustable and observation can be released separately. The galaxy catalogue now displays all galaxies by default on desktop, and half on mobile. Loading remains progressive; the density setting allows another level.
Navigation between stars now stays in the orbital view: the same camera, gestures and viewport through zooming out and back in. The false-colour Planck map is enabled by default, with background focal length halved independently of the camera; it can still be turned off; illustrative sizes range from ×1 to ×50, initially ×10.
When zooming out, unresolved planets and their labels disappear, leaving the stellar point. Nearby systems no longer compete for the target; reopening galaxies restores their rendering and Reframe restores an appropriate opening composition. Universe opens the global galaxy view directly; scales and galaxies remain directly accessible in the location picker.
Approaching spiral galaxies reveals a detailed illustrative texture within an oriented volume: disk, arms and bulge. Fine arms and dust occupy a structured layer while the diffuse disk and bulge retain their volume: close-ups show more detail without additional images. Images load only when the galaxy becomes resolved and are released when leaving the view. Shared textures are not photographs of the named galaxies.
Black holes: background and gestures
Wider opening view, Milky Way and stars enabled to reveal lensing, and an illustrative disk with irregular filaments. The panorama and stars reuse Earth-based visual references for teaching, not a measured sky from these objects. Pinching stays outside the horizon; switching from film to navigation retains limits appropriate to the framing.
Living views to share
The black-hole film orbits the camera to show light bending, with 1.5× closer framing and faster simulated time. The disk pattern rotates with simulated time, at orbital speeds depending on radius and mass; its appearance remains illustrative. Share now provides an embedded view with navigation gestures, minimal controls and a link to AstroLab. The homepage offers planet and black-hole views that load on request.
Share feedback on AstroLab
Help offers a guided report to review before sending, a contact for professional use and a page explaining resource rights. No additional account is needed.