See What Changed · SPACE

📸 See What Changed

What an update actually looks like, shown with screenshots taken in-game. The full day-by-day list lives in Recent Changes; this page picks out the changes you can see and explains them with pictures. Every scene below is somewhere you can fly to yourself.

The newest is 4 August 2026 — you can fly into a galaxy. Older updates follow further down.

You can fly into a galaxy 2026-08-04

Nebulae and clusters have long let you go inside them as you approach. Galaxies did not — from far away one was a single photograph, and the moment you crossed within three times its radius that photograph vanished and nothing took its place. You could fly 2.5 million light-years to Andromeda and arrive in empty space. Galaxies now have an interior. The day-by-day summary is in Recent Changes.

The core of the Andromeda Galaxy — a ring of light around the supermassive black hole, wrapped in dense stars, with a spiral arm of pink star-forming regions sweeping off to the left — **The core of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31)** — where 2.5 million light-years of travel puts you. The dark disc ringed with light on the right is this galaxy's **central supermassive black hole**, wrapped in the densely packed **old stars of the bulge**. The **pink points** streaming off to the left are places where stars are being born (HII regions), and they trace a spiral arm. There used to be nothing here at all.

🔭 Measurements decide the shape. Spiral, edge-on disk, dusty elliptical or Magellanic — along with inclination and position angle on the sky — all come from the catalogue. The stellar velocity dispersion around the central black hole sets how much of the galaxy is bulge, and even the diameter is derived rather than hand-typed: Andromeda spans 3.0° at 2.5 million light-years, so about 130,000 light-years across. Only what the catalogue does not record — individual star positions, how tightly the arms wind — is generated procedurally, and it is kept apart from what was measured.

Inside the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51) — spiral arms studded with pink star-forming regions winding out of a bright core across the frame — **The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51)** — the disk is turned almost face-on to you (20° inclination), so you can watch the **spiral wind**. **Pink star-forming regions** stud the arms as they reach out from the bright core, carrying on for nearly two turns to the bottom of the frame. About **280,000 light-years** across. The **number of arms and how tightly they wind** aren't in the catalogue, so they're generated; the inclination and the diameter are measured.

The core of Centaurus A — a blue jet streaming down from a black hole ringed with light, amid a swarm of yellow stars and dust — **Centaurus A (NGC 5128)** — one word, "galaxy", covers this too. With no spiral arms, it is a **dusty elliptical**: old yellow stars massed into a ball, and out of the black hole at its centre comes a **jet**. That jet is not invention — it is a **measured flag in the catalogue**, so it is placed here as well. About **160,000 light-years** across.

Inside the Large Magellanic Cloud — the Tarantula Nebula blazing white amid pink star-forming regions and coarse, bright stars — **Inside the Large Magellanic Cloud** — it is our neighbour, so **individual stars read coarsely**. The white blaze at the centre is the **Tarantula Nebula (30 Doradus)** — really the most active star-forming region in the Local Group, and a **measured signature** of this galaxy, so it is placed here too. Set beside the three above, the Magellanic disorder — no arms, no defined core — is unmistakable.

How to get there. Most famous galaxies are reached by selecting their central black hole as the destination (Andromeda, M51, the Sombrero, Centaurus A). Places where the galaxy itself is the destination — the LMC, Triangulum, the Pinwheel — work exactly the same way. Places worth visiting →

Exoplanets look different from each other 2026-07-31

Until now, 122 exoplanet giants were literally the same picture. The code choosing a planet's surface colours looked up its palette by the body's name instead of its kind, and the only names that matched were solar-system ones. Every other giant fell through to Jupiter's palette — even the blue ice giants. The day-by-day summary is in Recent Changes.

Wolf 359 b — a gas giant with flowing golden bands and an amber atmospheric limb — **Wolf 359 b — a golden gas giant** · radius 44,396 km. The server had always assigned this planet a **warm tan**, and it had never once reached the screen. Its bands and zones are now derived from that colour, and the **number and width of the bands** vary per planet too (before, every giant had the same count of bands at the same latitudes).

Wolf 359 f — a deep blue ice giant with white cloud bands — **Wolf 359 f — a blue ice giant** · **the same star system as the picture above**. Before this fix the two were **the same indistinguishable brown Jupiter** — and since only the atmospheric limb used the real colour, you got the contradiction of a **brown body with a blue rim**. Ice giants are now blue, as ice giants are, with fewer and softer bands.

The solar system is untouched. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune look up their hand-tuned palettes first, so not one pixel of them changed — their textures are pinned by checksum and checked automatically. Only what lies outside the solar system moved.

Rigel b — a dark basalt crust with orange lava glowing through its fissures — **Rigel b — a world with a molten crust** · equilibrium temperature **2,232 K**. A planet's look used to come from **radius alone**, so a rocky planet melting against its star and a frozen one were the same grey-brown. The **equilibrium temperature** set by the distance to the host star now decides too — past 1,100 K, where silicates actually melt, lava shows through the fissures like this. There are 15 rocky planets in the game above that threshold.

Luyten b — oceans, continents and white cloud bands, with a blue atmospheric rim and a red sunset along the terminator — **Luyten b — a world with oceans** · equilibrium temperature **303 K**, 12.2 light-years away. A real, measured habitable-zone planet. Temperate rocky worlds with an atmosphere now get **oceans, continents, cloud bands and polar caps**. The blue of the limb is not a copy of the body's colour but a separately computed **scattering colour**, and the red band on the left edge is a **sunset** — where light takes the long slant through the air at the day–night boundary and loses its blue.

Sirius e — a teal ice giant with a steeply tilted ring system casting a shadow across the planet — **Sirius e — an exoplanet giant with rings**. Rings existed only for **Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune**. Some exoplanet giants now wear them — and since rings always lie in the **equatorial plane**, a tilted spin axis tilts the rings with it. The thin line crossing the planet is the **shadow the rings cast** on it.

Tau Ceti e — a blue-grey sub-Neptune whose faint bands are sunk in thick haze — **Tau Ceti e — no longer a 'moon'** · 1.8 Earth radii, 11.9 light-years. At 1.6–2.5 Earth radii these are **sub-Neptunes wrapped in a thick hydrogen envelope**, yet the game drew them as **cratered moons** — and let you **land on them**. They now render as faintly banded worlds sunk in haze, and since they have **no solid surface you plunge into the clouds instead of landing** (same as a gas giant — fly it by hand and you can climb back out). **Seven** worlds are in this class, including Tau Ceti e and f and Gliese 581 c and d.

Atmospheres are decided by physics too. Whether a planet had an atmosphere used to be essentially a coin flip, which left one exoplanet in three airless for no reason at all. Two things are now worked out together — whether gravity can hold an atmosphere, and whether the stellar wind has stripped it away. The second is exactly why the Moon and Mercury are airless. The threshold is calibrated against the solar system: Earth, Venus, Mars, Titan and Pluto come out with atmospheres; the Moon, Mercury, Europa and Callisto come out airless.

The sky became three-dimensional 2026-07-25

Until now the stars were a picture painted on a sphere. Whichever system you flew to, the constellations looked exactly as they do from Earth. Every star now carries its measured distance, so the sky is re-projected from wherever your ship is — leave the Sun and the constellations really do deform. The day-by-day summary is in Recent Changes.

The sky seen from Alpha Centauri — a second sun burns at the right, with the Milky Way band across the star field — **The sky from Alpha Centauri** — 4.37 light-years from Earth. The bright star at right is this system's **second sun** (α Cen B). Barely four light-years out and the sky is already not Earth's: **Sirius has moved 27 degrees**, and at 9.5 light-years instead of 8.6 it has dimmed to 0.81×. That comes from re-projecting each star from its real parallax distance — not an invented number, but exactly (8.6/9.5)².

Also. Star colours got finer. Spectral types used to collapse into seven buckets, so B0 and B9 looked identical; now the decimal subclass is used too, giving 75 distinct tints. And 190 stars genuinely vary in brightness — only those with a measured period and amplitude were included. Algol drops 3.2× every 2.87 days as its partner eclipses it; Betelgeuse swells and fades over 2,335 days. Wind time forward and you can watch them.

Gaia BH3 — a black hole with no accretion disk, only starlight bent into arcs around it, flanked by rocky bodies — **Gaia BH3 — the black hole that doesn't shine** — **32.7 solar masses**, the heaviest stellar-mass black hole in our galaxy and the nearest of its class (1,924 light-years). The point of this photo is **the missing accretion disk**: its companion orbits 10.5 AU away and feeds it nothing, so the hole glows at no wavelength at all — not even X-rays. You know it is there only because the starlight behind it is **bent into arcs**. That is how it was actually found in 2024: an old, metal-poor giant beside it was seen **wobbling on an 11.6-year cycle**. In game, that giant is circling on the same orbit.

Four pieces of real research land in the game 2026-07-21

Everything in this update translates real observations and announcements from 2024–2026 into the game — and all four are places you can fly to right now. The day-by-day summary is in Recent Changes; how research makes it into SPACE is covered in Research in the Game.

Alpha Centauri Ab — a banded gas giant with the ship passing in front — **Alpha Centauri Ab (candidate)** — a candidate gas giant JWST imaged in 2024 in the **habitable zone** of α Cen A, the nearest sun-like star. It carries its measured orbit (2.1 AU, eccentricity 0.4), and the fact that follow-ups haven't re-detected it yet — its **'candidate' status — is stated right in the destination notes**. A 4.37-light-year cruise: the game's most popular star system just gained a new port of call.

Saturn irregular moon S/2023 S 1 — the ship beside a small rock, swarm labels in the sky — **128 irregular moons of Saturn** — the batch the IAU confirmed in March 2025, carried with their **real measured orbits**, bringing Saturn to 274 moons. Pictured: alongside S/2023 S 1, with other members of the swarm labelled in the sky. Most orbit backwards (retrograde) in the Norse group — debris clouds from ancient collisions. Every one is a destination you can **land on** — including a 1 km rock, the smallest body in the game.

Sagittarius A* — the accretion disk and photon ring bent by the geodesic lens — **Sagittarius A* never rests** — JWST's 48-hour stare at our galaxy's central black hole revealed non-stop variability, and the accretion disk now carries it: seconds-to-minutes flickers stacked with **a few big flares a day**. It runs deterministically on real wall-clock time, so **every visitor sees the same flare at the same moment** — linger a while and wait for an eruption.

Apep — four nested amber dust spirals around a Wolf-Rayet binary — **A new deep-sky destination: Apep** — **four nested amber dust shells** sculpted over ~700 years by the colliding winds of two Wolf-Rayet stars. This year JWST resolved the ground-based 'pinwheel' into these layered shells — one of the rarest objects in the galaxy. Find it in the sky, aim, and cruise there yourself (~7,800 light-years).

Previous update 2026-07-18

Nebulae now look like real astrophotography 2026-07-18

Until now a nebula was a soft gradient with thin coloured lines scribbled across it — squiggly filaments that no real photograph has. This update rewrites how nebulae are drawn. A nebula is now a fractal cloud of turbulent gas: red H-α through the bulk, teal O-III in the bright ionized core, and dark dust lanes weaving between — the very layers you see in Hubble and JWST images.

The Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) — dark dust pillars rising through glowing golden dust clouds — **The Carina Nebula (Cosmic Cliffs)** — the nebula as painted on the far sky. Golden dust clouds swirl in turbulence with **dark dust pillars** rising through them. Instead of a gradient plus lines, the brightness now varies at **every scale** — far closer to the nebulae in a photo book.

🔭 Inside and outside are different pictures. The far painting and the volumetric gas you fly through inside are separate code, but both were redrawn with the same colour science (ionization layers, dust lanes) so the inside and outside no longer disagree.

Inside the Orion Nebula — red H-α gas surrounds you with fibrous gas tufts and newborn stars scattered through it — **Inside the Orion Nebula (M42)** — **fly into** the nebula's chart and red H-α gas wraps all around you. Instead of round fog, **fibrous gas tufts** layer up, with newborn stars carrying **diffraction spikes** embedded among them. A nebula really is where stars are born, and you thread between them.

Five more places worth visiting 2026-07-18

With the new nebula graphics changing the sky, the Places Worth Visiting gallery gained five more beautiful deep-sky sights — the Veil Nebula (a supernova remnant), the North America and Cat's Eye nebulae, and Bode's Galaxy (M81) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). All were captured live in-game, each with a link that takes you right there.

Veil Nebula (Cygnus Loop) — thin red and teal filaments swirl across the sky — **Veil Nebula (Cygnus Loop)** — the **supernova remnant** of a star that exploded ~10,000 years ago. Thin **filaments** of red hydrogen and teal oxygen curl like smoke, a very different texture of debris from the Crab Nebula.

Bode's Galaxy (M81) — a golden core wrapped in blue spiral arms studded with pink star-forming regions — **Bode's Galaxy (M81)** — a **grand-design spiral** 12 million light-years away. Blue arms wrap a golden core, with **pink star-forming regions** strung along them. It joins the gallery alongside the **Pinwheel Galaxy (M101)**.

Earlier update 2026-07-16

Arrive at a star cluster and you stand among its stars

The Pleiades (M45) has long been a place you could sail to. But arriving left the cluster still pasted far away on the backdrop — a painting that never grew as you approached. Now, getting there surrounds you with its stars.

Inside the Pleiades — bright sisters with diffraction spikes, hundreds of member stars, and blue reflection nebulosity all around — **Inside the Pleiades** — the brilliant stars throwing **diffraction spikes** are the **Seven Sisters**: Alcyone, Atlas, Electra, Maia, Merope… Their placement isn't invented — it comes from their **real measured sky coordinates**. The familiar pattern you know from looking up from Earth is, from **inside** the cluster, unfolded all around you. The hundreds of fainter stars are its unnamed members (M45 has roughly 1,000; only nine are naked-eye), and the **blue haze** at upper right is the **reflection nebulosity** — dust the cluster is drifting through, scattering its starlight.

🔭 Why is it blue? The nebula doesn't shine on its own — the cluster's hot blue-white starlight scatters off the dust. For the same reason the sky is blue, scattered light comes out bluer than the starlight itself. At about 100 million years old, the Pleiades is young enough to still be passing through this dust.

Inside the Virgo cluster — the members are hundreds of galaxies, with a giant elliptical at the core — **The Virgo Cluster** — same word, "cluster", but here **every member is a galaxy**. Arrive at this one, 53 million light-years out, and hundreds of galaxies hang around you with a **giant elliptical** at the core. The galaxies near the centre are red (old, no longer making new stars) while blue spirals survive further out — the **morphology–density relation** seen in real clusters.

Saturn's rings cast their shadow onto Saturn

One of the first things you notice in a photograph of Saturn is the dark banding the rings draw across the planet. That shadow now exists.

Saturn — the rings lay several dark shadow bands across the southern cloud tops, and the gap between rings stays a gap in the shadow — **Saturn's ring shadow** — the rings block sunlight and lay **several dark bands** across the cloud tops. Look closely and there's a **bright gap** between them: sunlight through the empty lane in the rings themselves (the **Cassini Division**). Where the rings are dense the shadow is dark; the thin C ring casts only a faint one.

Uranus — spinning on its side, so its rings and their shadow follow that tilt — **Uranus** — a planet that spins almost **on its side**, at 97.8°. Its rings stand at that tilt, and the shadow follows. Each planet's shadow comes from that body's **real measured obliquity**.

The Crab Nebula gets its supernova-remnant colours back

The Crab Nebula (M1) is the wreckage of a star that exploded in 1054. Yet it had been painted in the pink of a nebula where stars are born — the opposite kind of place, in the same colours.

Inside the Crab Nebula — orange knots and blue-white light spread like a thin haze all around — **Inside the Crab (M1)** — flying through the wreckage, **orange knots** and **blue-white light** spread around you like a thin haze. The orange is blasted material glowing as it cools; the blue-white comes from the **pulsar** left at the centre, flinging out particles. This used to be the **pink of a stellar nursery**.

🔍 Inside and outside differ. Inside, the nebula is this sparse haze — the dense filament web you know from photographs is what you see from light-years away, taking in the whole remnant at once, and in-game that's the Crab hanging in the distant sky. This fix corrected the colours of both the distant view and the gas inside it (they're separate code — fix one and the two disagree).

The stars' colours got the same treatment. Every star of a given class (M, B…) used to share one colour; now they're painted from their measured spectral type. Even among red dwarfs, Proxima and its cooler neighbours now differ subtly.

Changes of 18 July 2026 — everything in the nebula-graphics overhaul.
Changes of 16 July 2026 — star clusters, Saturn ring shadows, and more.
Recent Changes — the full day-by-day list (including internal work).
Travel · Places — everywhere you can go, clusters and nebulae included.
Physics · Cosmos — what this game reproduces from measurement.