Show HN: Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites
- ID
- 30347
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 30 Sep 2026, 3:08 AM
- Fetched
- 30 Sep 2026, 11:05 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://space.bl2.net/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 30 Sep 2026, 11:06 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
A Show HN project at space.bl2.net renders a real-time Solar System scene with 526,000 asteroids and what the title describes as all tracked satellites, published 2026-09-29 and drawing 308 points and 78 comments on Hacker News. The UI (shown in Cyrillic, with a 'Belle Lune 2' header) supports click-for-body-card-and-orbit, double-click to fly to a body, WASD flight, R/F for up/down, Q/E and arrow keys to rotate, Shift to move faster, group highlighting, an orbit toggle, and a UTC clock with a manual data refresh. The excerpt is interface strings only — it contains no data sources, update cadence, rendering technique, or accuracy claims.
Why it matters
Treat this as a demo to poke at, not a technique writeup: the pasted text gives no implementation detail, so you cannot yet learn how 526k asteroid positions plus satellite tracks are streamed and drawn at interactive frame rates. If you build any browser visualization with large object counts, the useful move is to open the app and read the 78-comment thread, where the real questions (data provenance for 'all tracked satellites', how stale the positions are, whether it's instanced rendering or LOD) would have been raised — nothing in this text answers them.
Discussion angle
Pull up space.bl2.net live and ask: what would it actually take to draw 526k moving bodies in a browser tab — instanced meshes, LOD, or precomputed tracks — and does the HN thread contain anyone who checked the satellite data against a real source like Celestrak?