Hey everyone,

Quick context on why I built AstroGrid : I wanted to make something for anyone who's curious about the universe, whether you're a student, a self-learner, a teacher, or just someone who likes staring at space at 2am. Every explainer I could find was either a flat textbook diagram or a YouTube video you'd zone out of in 30 seconds. I wanted something you could just grab, tilt, spin, and fly through.

It kept growing, and now it's a 3D atlas of the universe you can explore in your browser. No install, no signup. Built with classroom and self-learner use in mind.

A few things you can actually figure out by using it

How big things really are. Park Earth next to Jupiter, then next to the Sun. Numbers like "100x larger" don't really land until you see it. Same with distance: flying from Earth to Mars at a fixed speed feels very different from reading "225 million km."
Why Kepler's laws look the way they do. Crank the time speed up and watch Mercury whip around while Neptune barely moves. You stop needing to memorize the law and just see why it has to be true.

Why eclipses don't happen every month. The Moon's orbit is tilted, and that's almost impossible to picture from a 2D diagram. In 3D it's obvious in about five seconds.

Constellations aren't flat. Fly sideways out of the solar system and watch Orion fall apart. The "belt" is actually three stars at wildly different distances. This one tends to genuinely surprise people.

What a black hole does to light. There's a real general-relativity lensing effect around the black holes, and you can orbit one and watch the background stars bend around it. Hard to forget once you've seen it.

The scale of the universe. Zoom out from your street to the Solar System, to the Milky Way, to the Local Group, to the cosmic web. The sheer emptiness between things is the part that hits hardest.

Everything is based on real astronomical data (NASA JPL for the Solar System, the HYG catalog for stars, OpenNGC for deep-sky objects, LIGO data for gravitational wave events, etc.), so what you're seeing isn't decorative. It's where those things actually are.

If you teach, or you're just curious about space, I'd really love to hear what's confusing, what's missing, or what you wish you could do next. That feedback is what shapes the next update.

Thanks for taking a look.