A View With Its Sources

What The Models Show

Planetary sizes and orbital spacing are compressed. Orbits are illustrative, not current positions. The Milky Way and destination pins are schematic: nearby systems are spread apart to make them selectable. The galaxy is not a photograph from outside our home. Rendered stars are not an observed catalog.

Earth maps are composites, not current weather. Early geological surfaces are illustrations. The 200 and 300 million-year views use PALEOMAP reconstructions with modern borders as reference overlays. Other historical Earth chapters use modern geography. Planet interiors are inferred from measurements and models.

City maps open with topographic terrain and shaded relief. Street and satellite views are also available. Satellite capture dates vary. Terrain is a physical map, not a photorealistic 3D reconstruction. Historical photographs, maps and artworks retain their own dates and perspectives. They do not automatically depict the earliest era in a city’s timeline. No generated ancient city view is presented as archaeological evidence.

The Material

Planet textures: Solar System Scope / INOVE, CC BY 4.0. These NASA-derived maps include artistic adjustments and reconstructed gaps. Maps are compressed for browser use.

Ancient Earth: Christopher R. Scotese, PALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlates v3 (2016), CC BY 4.0. Color represents reconstructed geography and relief.

Galaxy destination imagery comes from NASA, ESA, STScI, ESO and the EHT Collaboration, with object-level credits in the close-view panels. Images are resized and compressed. Artist concepts, processed observations and educational artwork are labeled separately.

City archive records show their creator, reuse terms and source link. Satellite tiles are credited in the map to Esri, Vantor, Earthstar Geographics and the GIS User Community. Topographic maps are credited to Esri and its contributing providers in the map. Street maps are © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License. Google Earth opens as a separate service.

Read The Evidence

Mean planet diameters and physical parameters: JPL Solar System Dynamics. Facts are rounded for reading. Historical dates are approximate where stated.

City histories link their sources beside each era. Some use secondary references, including Wikipedia; those summaries are an educational starting point, not a substitute for specialist historical research.

Privacy

This framework adds no analytics, advertising, user accounts, forms, application cookies or persistent browser storage. Hosting infrastructure can retain access logs. The city selected in the atlas appears in the page address so that a destination can be shared.

Opening the city atlas requests topographic or satellite tiles from Esri, or street tiles from OpenStreetMap. When the operator enables Google Maps, the city viewer requests maps from Google instead. Some historical images may be served by Wikimedia or their source archive. These services receive ordinary network information such as an IP address. External source, NASA Eyes and Google Earth links load their respective providers when opened. Their own privacy practices apply. Google Maps use is also subject to the Google Maps Additional Terms of Service and Google Privacy Policy.

Fonts and planetary textures are served with the site. No location permission is requested: city coordinates come from the atlas, not the visitor’s device.

Terms Of Use

This is an educational framework for exploration and review. Its visual models are unsuitable for navigation, mission planning or determining present-day celestial positions. Source images retain their stated licenses and attribution requirements; a link to a source does not transfer rights in its material.

The framework is still under review. A public release needs an identified operator, a contact route and review of the notices appropriate to that release. No commercial service or professional advice is offered here.

Accessibility

Destinations can be selected with buttons, without dragging the 3D scene. Keyboard focus is visible. Reduced-motion preferences stop automatic rotation and make camera transitions immediate. Map zoom, image zoom and reset controls have text labels for assistive technology.

The 3D display requires JavaScript and WebGPU or WebGL 2. These notes and their source lists remain readable without it. The framework has automated checks, but has not yet completed independent assistive-technology and blind design review.