Orbitry

Orbitry shows every publicly tracked human-made object in space, from the satellite crossing your sky to the rovers on Mars.

• Landing page (/): live hero globe and live numbers, with a tour of every feature.
• Earth globe (/globe/): every active object, colored by orbit, purpose, country or operator. You can search, rewind or fast-forward time, and click an object to trace its orbit. Every view shows how old the data is and how accurate it is.
• Moon and Mars (/moon/, /mars/): landers, rovers, impact sites and orbiters at their real coordinates, with dates and outcomes.
• Deep space (/solar-system/): planets and probes from JPL Horizons, with each probe's distance, speed and signal travel time.
• Launches and re-entries (/launches/).
• Object pages (/object/?norad=25544, /object/?id=moon:apollo-11): photo, 3D model, key facts, a reviewed summary and sources. Each image and model shows its licence. With an Anthropic API key set, visitors can ask about the object: Claude answers only from its record and each sentence shows the facts it used.
• Pass predictor (/passes/): ISS, Tiangong, Starlink trains or any object, with times, direction and brightness. A free account adds saved locations, favorites and email alerts.
• API and embeds (/developers/): a documented JSON API (a free tier with attribution, and API Pro) and an iframe globe.
• Astro planner (/planner/, paid): darkness, Moon, weather and target ranking for your sky and gear, satellite-streak prediction for your exposures, and a nightly email.

How it fits together

pipeline/          Node scripts that download and merge upstream data → public/data/*.json
content/           Hand-curated records (Moon/Mars sites, probes, 3D models, descriptions)
public/            The static site: plain HTML, CSS and ES modules, no build step
  js/lib/          Shared, dependency-free logic, also used by the Worker and the tests
  js/app/          Page scripts
  vendor/          satellite.js and three.js browser builds (npm run vendor)
src/worker/        Cloudflare Worker for /api/*: API v1, accounts, alerts, billing, cron jobs
migrations/        D1 (SQLite) schema
scripts/           Description drafting/review, coordinate checks, vendoring
test/              node:test suites; the Worker tests run against SQLite and data fixtures

Orbital mechanics run in the browser: SGP4 through satellite.js, with Sun and Moon positions from low-precision almanac formulas. The same modules run in the Worker for API passes and email alerts.

Data sources

Data	Source	Refresh
Orbital elements (OMM)	CelesTrak GP, active set	every 2 h
Object type, launch and decay dates	CelesTrak SATCAT	daily
Operator, country, purpose, mass	Jonathan McDowell's GCAT (CC BY 4.0)	daily
Planets and probes	NASA/JPL Horizons	daily
Launches	The Space Devs, Launch Library 2	every 3 h
Photos and licences	Wikidata + Wikimedia Commons	weekly
3D models	NASA 3D Resources (pinned commit)	manual
Deep-sky targets	OpenNGC (CC BY-SA 4.0)	monthly
Weather (planner)	Open-Meteo	on demand

Downloads are cached in .cache/ with per-source maximum ages. If a source is down, the last good copy is reused. public/data/meta.json records what happened on each run.

Descriptions: drafted by Claude, published by people

1. ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=… npm run draft -- --curated (or -- --norad 25544,20580). Claude drafts 2–4 sentences from the record alone and cites the fields each sentence relies on. Drafts land in content/descriptions/ as unreviewed, and any citation of a field that doesn't exist is flagged.
2. npm run review -- --by "Your Name" shows the record, the draft and its citations. You can approve, edit, or reject it.
3. Only approved descriptions are written to public/data/descriptions.json on the next pipeline run.

The Moon, Mars and probe records in content/ follow the same idea. Each has a review block, and the site labels unreviewed records Awaiting review. npm run check:sites compares surface coordinates with Wikidata.

Running it locally

Needs Node 22.13 or later.

npm ci
npm run pipeline            # downloads data into public/data (about a minute; --skip-slow skips photos)
npm test
cp .dev.vars.example .dev.vars
npm run db:migrate:local
npm run dev                 # http://localhost:8787. Sign-in links are printed in the terminal.

To try the static pages without the Worker, serve public/ with any static server. Account features then show as unavailable.

Publishing on GitHub Pages (static)

.github/workflows/pages.yml builds the data and publishes public/ to GitHub Pages every two hours and on every push to main. One-time setup: Settings → Pages → Build and deployment → Source: GitHub Actions, and set the custom domain to orbitry.net on the same page. On Pages, everything that runs in the browser works. Accounts, alerts, API keys, the API and the paid planner features need the Worker below, so the site hides them.

Deploying the full site (Cloudflare Workers + D1)

1. npx wrangler d1 create orbitry, then put the returned database_id into wrangler.toml.
2. Set secrets with npx wrangler secret put …:
   • RESEND_API_KEY (verify the sending domain in Resend; EMAIL_FROM is in wrangler.toml)
   • IP_SALT
   • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY turns on Ask about this object (optional; set ASK_MODEL in [vars] to pick the model)
   • STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, STRIPE_WEBHOOK_SECRET, STRIPE_PRICE_API_PRO, STRIPE_PRICE_PLANNER
3. Point a Stripe webhook at https://orbitry.net/api/billing/webhook for checkout.session.completed and customer.subscription.*, and turn on the customer portal.
4. Uncomment the routes line in wrangler.toml once orbitry.net is a Cloudflare zone.
5. Add CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN and CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID as GitHub secrets and set the repository variable DEPLOY_TARGET to cloudflare. .github/workflows/data.yml then rebuilds the data every two hours, deploys, and records element history in D1, and the Pages workflow stops. Point orbitry.net's DNS at Cloudflare instead of GitHub Pages.

Displayed prices live in public/js/app/plans.js. What you charge is set by the Stripe prices.

Accuracy

Positions come from public elements and SGP4. They're good for visualisation and pass timing, and not for collision avoidance or precise pointing. The site says this wherever it shows a position. See /about/.