Pixel Solar System Screensaver
The Pixel Solar System screensaver shows the planets and about a thousand real catalogued asteroids at their computed positions right now, drawn as pixel art. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
How the Pixel Solar System screensaver works
Planet positions are solved on your device from JPL's J2000 mean orbital elements, the same table the Orrery uses.
The asteroid belt is not decorative. About a thousand numbered main-belt asteroids are pulled from JPL's Small-Body Database with their own orbital elements, and each one is propagated from the catalogue epoch to the current instant.
Positions were checked against JPL Horizons: Ceres, Vesta and Pallas all land within about 0.002 AU of Horizons' own numbers, the expected residual for two-body elements.
It is a flat map looking down on the ecliptic, so a body's height above or below the plane is not shown — Pallas is tilted 35° and you cannot see that here.
A worked example
The belt is the point. Drawn from real elements it is not a tidy ring but a broad, clumpy band — denser toward the inner edge, with thin lanes where the Kirkwood gaps fall at orbital resonances with Jupiter. A randomly scattered belt would look almost the same and would mean nothing.
Settings & tips
- Time-lapse runs from live up to a month per second — the inner planets lap visibly while Jupiter barely moves.
- Field of view switches between the inner system with the belt, and the full system out to Neptune.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes. Planets come from JPL's J2000 elements and the belt from JPL's Small-Body Database, propagated on your device. Nothing is simulated or scattered at random.
- Is a key needed?
- No. Both sources are fully key-less.
- Why can't I see orbital tilt?
- It's a top-down map of the ecliptic plane, so height above the plane isn't drawn. The tilt is still used when computing each body's position.