Every one of these is a real thing you can point at. They are the stories SkyLumi tells you in the app — reviewed for accuracy, written to be read by someone standing outside in the dark rather than sitting an exam.
52 stories. Each one is anchored to a real place in the sky, and SkyLumi can take you to it.
Every naked-eye star belongs to the Milky Way. Other galaxies you can see without a telescope: Andromeda, and from the south the two Magellanic Clouds. Arrows mark whichever of them are above your horizon tonight.
ESO/P. Horálek · CC BY 4.0
Everything you're seeing is from the past as light needs time to reach you. Moon: 1.3 seconds. Vega: 25 years. Betelgeuse: ~600 years. Andromeda: 2.5 million. The slider steps through tonight's sky by age.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
A space station the size of a football field, 400 km up, orbiting at 28,000 km/h — one lap every 90 minutes. The crew sees 16 sunrises a day.
NASA
Not a star: a planet wrapped in reflective cloud. Surface: ~460°C, hotter than Mercury. The brightest object in the night sky after the Moon.
NASA/JPL
The largest planet: all the others would fit inside it. The Great Red Spot is a storm wider than Earth, observed for 190+ years. 115 known moons as of 2026; 4 show in binoculars.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
The red is rust: iron oxide dust. It is inhabited only by robots — two active rovers. It also has the solar system's tallest volcano, 2.5× Everest.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
1 trillion stars, 2.5 million light-years away — the farthest naked-eye object. It spans 6 full Moons at its widest; your eye catches only its core. It approaches at 110 km/s.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
Our galaxy is a flat disc, seen from inside. The bright band means looking along it through billions of stars. 90° away means looking out of it, toward other galaxies.
ESO/S. Brunier · CC BY 4.0
Galaxies are not spread evenly. Virgo and Coma: thousands behind one patch. The Milky Way band: blocked by our dust. Boötes: a 330-million-light-year void. A fist at arm’s length covers 10°.
ESO · CC BY 4.0
The dark rifts in the band are dense dust clouds — star nurseries, not gaps. Aboriginal Australians drew the Emu in the Sky from them; the Coalsack is its head.
ESO/Y. Beletsky · CC BY 4.0
Amber: globular clusters, 12–13 billion years old — older than the galaxy’s spiral. Cyan: Orion and the Pleiades, under 100 million. Sharks are older than the Pleiades.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
5 of the Dipper’s 7 stars formed together ~300 million years ago and still travel as a group. The Sun is just passing through. The pattern changes within ~100,000 years.
SkyLumi · Gaia DR3 / Hipparcos · CC BY-SA 4.0
You are part of three motions at once: the Sun drifts toward Vega at ~70,000 km/h; Andromeda approaches at 110 km/s; everything nearby streams toward the Great Attractor at ~600 km/s. Arrows mark the ones above your horizon.
ESO/F. Char · CC BY 4.0
Marked: TRAPPIST-1 (7 Earth-sized planets), Proxima b (the nearest exoplanet), and the Kepler field — ~2,700 confirmed planets in one small square because we stared there for 4 years.
ESO/N. Bartmann · CC BY 4.0
Launched in 2018 as a rocket test dummy payload: a red Tesla with a spacesuited mannequin. It now orbits the Sun beyond Mars’s orbit. The arrow marks its live position.
SpaceX · public-domain
Launched in 1977. The farthest human-made object: a radio call takes nearly a day to reach it. Still transmitting at 17 km/s. Power runs out in the 2030s; it keeps coasting.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The first photographed black hole (2019). Mass: 6.5 billion Suns. Distance: 55 million light-years. The ring is light bent around it from behind.
EHT Collaboration · CC BY 4.0
7 Earth-sized planets around one red dwarf. The whole system is smaller than Mercury’s orbit. 3 are in the habitable zone. All are tidally locked: permanent day on one face, night on the other.
ESO/N. Bartmann/spaceengine.org · CC BY 4.0
The nearest exoplanet: 4.2 light-years away, roughly Earth-sized, and in the habitable zone. Its red-dwarf star flares hard. Today’s spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to get there.
ESO/M. Kornmesser · CC BY 4.0
A confirmed planet orbiting two stars — a real double sunset. On its moons, you would cast two shadows. NASA’s travel poster says: “where your shadow always has company.”
NASA/JPL-Caltech
A planet twice Earth's size, covered in molten rock. Its year is 18 hours. Surface: 1,500°C+. Its star is visible to the naked eye from dark sites.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The thin sky band where Earth's transit across the Sun is detectable. ~1,700 star systems have had that view in 5,000 years; ~75 are close enough to have received our broadcasts.
NASA/SDO
From 2015, this star dimmed by up to 22% at random — a planet blocks ~1%. Astronomers seriously tested the alien-megastructure idea. The best answer is uneven dust.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
A red supergiant ~600 light-years away. At the Sun, it would engulf Mars. It will go supernova within ~100,000 years. Its light is 600 years old, so it may already have exploded.
ESO/M. Montargès et al. · CC BY 4.0
A supernova recorded in China on July 4, 1054 — visible by day for 23 days. Its debris still expands at 1,500 km/s and visibly grows between photos taken decades apart.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
Collapsed star cores: more than a Sun’s mass in a city-sized sphere. The Crab spins 30×/second; the record holder, PSR J1748−2446ad, 716×/second. A teaspoon outweighs a mountain.
ESA/Hubble & NASA · CC BY 4.0
In the 1840s it flared to the second-brightest star in the sky, shed 10+ Suns of material, and survived. Mass: ~100 Suns. A future supernova is guaranteed.
ESA/Hubble & NASA · CC BY 4.0
A cluster of 1,000+ stars, ~100 million years old — younger than sharks. Unrelated cultures worldwide tell of seven sisters, with one missing.
NOIRLab/NSF/AURA · CC BY 4.0
~10 million stars in one ball, seen as one fuzzy star. Near its core, stars are a fraction of a light-year apart. It may be the stripped core of a swallowed galaxy.
ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM · CC BY 4.0
One quasar, 8 billion light-years away, appears 4 times because a foreground galaxy bends its light along different paths. This is gravitational lensing, exactly as Einstein predicted.
ESA/Hubble & NASA · CC BY 4.0
The brightest quasar in visible light: 2.4 billion light-years away, magnitude ~12.9, and reachable with an 8-inch telescope. The farthest object a human eye can see directly.
ESA/Hubble & NASA · CC BY 4.0
Earth’s axis wobbles on a ~26,000-year cycle. Polaris is temporary; Vega takes over in ~12,000 years. The pyramids aligned with an earlier pole star, Thuban.
ESO/B. Tafreshi (twanight.org) · CC BY 4.0
Our broadcasts spread at light speed, growing one light-year a year. The 1969 Moon-landing signal is a sphere a little under 60 light-years across — still in that shell.
NASA
Five spacecraft are leaving the solar system forever: Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11, and New Horizons. Five directions. No return.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC
Voyager 1 carries a playable gold record: greetings in 55 languages, music, a heartbeat, and player instructions. Its first stellar flyby is Gliese 445, in ~40,000 years.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Geostationary orbit is 35,786 km up, where one orbit takes one day, so satellites stay over one spot. Hundreds sit along this arc. Clarke published the idea in 1945.
NOAA/NASA GOES Project
Binoculars show up to 4 dots beside Jupiter: moons that rearrange from night to night. Galileo used them against geocentrism in 1610. Europa holds more water than Earth’s oceans.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute
Apollo 11 landed here. Its footprints remain because the Moon has no weather. Laser reflectors still measure the Moon moving away at 3.8 cm each year.
NASA
The largest space telescope sits 1.5 million km out, opposite the Sun. Its 18 gold mirrors sit behind a tennis-court sunshield at −230°C. At midnight, it is in the darkest sky.
NASA/Goddard/Chris Gunn
In 1974, Arecibo sent 1,679 bits to this cluster: numbers, DNA, a human figure, and our address. It arrives around the year 27,000.
SkyLumi · Arecibo Observatory, 1974 · public-domain
The Milky Way’s central black hole: 4 million Suns, 26,000 light-years away, just off the Teapot’s spout. It was photographed in 2022.
EHT Collaboration · CC BY 4.0
The nearest known black hole is ~1,560 light-years away. A Sun-like star wobbles around its invisible 10-solar-mass companion. Our galaxy may hold ~100 million more.
International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA · CC BY 4.0
Everything nearby — the Milky Way, Andromeda, the whole neighborhood — streams toward one region at ~600 km/s. It hides behind our galaxy’s dust. Expansion means we never arrive.
ESO · CC BY 4.0
A leading solar-sibling candidate: it shares the Sun’s chemical fingerprint and likely formed in the same cluster 4.5 billion years ago. It is visible in binoculars.
ESO · CC BY 4.0
A deep-blue gas giant, colored by silicate (glass) clouds: ~930°C, winds ~8,700 km/h. Its color came from the light lost when it slipped behind its star.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
A planet on a ~1-day orbit, stretched egg-shaped by its star and losing ~6 billion tonnes each second. Darker than asphalt. It has ~10 million years left.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
Its estimated age approaches the universe’s 13.8 billion years. It is nearly pure hydrogen and helium, formed before most heavier elements existed.
SkyLumi · published stellar ages · public-domain
A dying Sun-like star’s outer layers: the Sun’s fate in ~5 billion years. Webb shows ~20,000 gas clumps and ~10 outer arcs, spaced ~280 years apart.
ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA · CC BY 4.0
Star-forming dust columns in the Eagle Nebula (M16), ~6,500 light-years away, each several light-years tall. Hubble’s 1995 image shows dust; Webb’s infrared reveals newborn stars inside.
NASA/ESA/CSA Webb · CC BY 4.0
The middle “star” in Orion’s sword is a 24-light-year-wide nebula: the nearest massive star factory, with 1,000+ stars forming now. Webb found hundreds of free-floating planet-mass objects there.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
In 1995, Hubble stared for 10 days at an “empty” patch the size of a sand grain at arm’s length. It found ~3,000 galaxies. The patch is one thirty-millionth of the sky.
NASA/ESA Hubble · CC BY 4.0
In June 2025 the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images. One patch covers the southern Virgo Cluster: millions of galaxies, 55 million light-years away, assembled from 1,185 exposures in seven nights. The tiles you see are that image, laid on this map.
NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory/NOIRLab/SLAC/AURA · CC BY 4.0