30× speed
Looking Up is a live map of the brightest objects in low Earth orbit. Every moving glyph is a real satellite – its position computed in your browser several times a second (the one you've picked, every frame) from current orbital elements using SGP4, the same propagation model NORAD uses. The useful part is up top: the next time something bright crosses your sky, where to look, and a way to put it on your calendar. Press show me and the camera drops out of orbit to your own horizon, and draws the pass where you'll see it.
A three.js globe rendered as braille ground and text glyphs through a custom GLSL shader. SGP4 orbital propagation runs in your browser via satellite.js – positions are computed, not fetched. TLEs come from Celestrak through a small serverless proxy (edge-cached, with a snapshot baked in at build as fallback); land/ocean dot data is generated at build time from Natural Earth; places come from GeoNames, baked in at build. esbuild bundles it. No framework.
I'm Chase Conching – a designer/developer in Honolulu making a series of small experiments at chase.is. This is one of them: real data, real physics, rendered as something worth staring at.
data: celestrak · land: natural earth · places: geonames (cc by 4.0) · built with three.js & satellite.js