Orrery: Live Solar System Wallpaper

Not a video. A calculation.

Most animated wallpapers loop a rendered clip. This one solves the ephemeris every frame. Open it right now and Jupiter is at the longitude Jupiter is at, Mars shows the face Mars is showing, and the Moon is in tonight's phase. Leave it running for a year and it will still be right, because nothing was recorded.

Or fly there yourself: Cabin mode

Switch the view to the spacecraft cabin and your desktop becomes the cockpit of a ship on its way to another world. It lifts off from Starbase on its own rocket at the next launch window, crosses the system on a real transfer orbit, parks, and lands - on Mars into Jezero the way Perseverance did, on Venus through Venera 13's clouds, into Jupiter on the air the Galileo probe measured until the hull gives out. Every descent is flown from measured data. The cockpit is retro Apollo/Soyuz: attitude ball, dials, DSKY, a CRT nav screen and a teleprinter from mission control, with life support, power, propellant and the radio link all modelled. Leave it alone and the autopilot picks the next trip.

Eight looks

Realistic, Cartoon with faces, Lively, Blueprint, Stained glass, Infrared false colour - and, for the cat people, every planet as a cat or a mochi cat.

The bodies

The Sun, eight planets and Pluto on JPL orbits, spinning on their real IAU axes - Venus backwards over 243 days, Uranus lying on its side

21 moons, from our own to Charon, each on elements re-derived from JPL Horizons

14 comets, with ion and dust tails that only appear inside 3 au, because that is when a real comet grows one

The asteroid belt, with the Kirkwood gaps and both Trojan clouds where the data puts them - not arranged by hand

8 spacecraft on their real trajectories: Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, New Horizons, the Parker Solar Probe, Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope

The sky behind them

8,789 Hipparcos stars in their true places, coloured by their real B-V index - orange Betelgeuse beside blue-white Rigel

76 galaxies, nebulae and clusters at their true angular size, every row checked against SIMBAD

A Milky Way generated along the real galactic plane

Lock the camera onto any of them - the Andromeda Galaxy, the Orion Nebula, the Pleiades - and the view narrows until it fills the screen.

Surfaces from spacecraft, not from noise

Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, the four giants, Jupiter's four great moons and Pluto wear re-projected NASA and USGS imagery, so the Great Red Spot, Valles Marineris, Io's volcanoes and Pluto's heart are where they really are. Saturn's rings follow a measured radial profile, which is why the Cassini division sits at 1.95 planet radii instead of at a guess. At noon UTC the Sun really is over Greenwich, and the test suite checks it.

Yours to point

Click any planet on the desktop and the camera flies to it

Switch to true distances or true sizes and see how empty the system really is - click a planet and the camera lands on it

The info card names the next conjunction, opposition or greatest elongation, and the tour makes a detour when one is close

Or let the guided tour choose, in a different order every time, holding each stop as long as you like

A panel names what you are looking at and how far away it is - and it does the same for whatever you picked yourself, not only for tour stops

Real time, or up to a month per second, or frozen at a date you choose

One scene spanning every monitor, or each monitor its own view with its own focus

In 10 languages, following your Windows language

It stays out of the way

Your desktop icons stay on top, and stay clickable

It pauses for fullscreen apps and games, when a window covers the desktop, when the session locks, and optionally on battery

Frame cap and render quality are yours to set

Nothing leaves your machine

No telemetry, no account, no network at run time. Every position is computed locally from catalogue data installed with the program. Settings and logs live under %APPDATA%, never inside the install folder.

How accurate, exactly

The test suite scores every body against JPL Horizons vectors at epochs the fitting never saw. Worst case for a planet over 1900-2049 is Saturn at about 9 arcminutes - the accuracy limit of the JPL fit itself. Moons are harder: a single Kepler orbit frozen at J2000 puts Mimas 42% of its orbit radius out of place by 2026, so the elements are re-derived once a year and interpolated, which brings Mimas to 6% and every other moon under 2.5%.

Distances and body radii are compressed - at true scale the inner planets would be invisible next to Neptune. Directions are not: conjunctions, orbital planes and inclinations are truthful.