[bradknowles]

Not nearly as easy to navigate and discover as apps like Stellarium.

Now, if they had the database with hundreds of terabytes of objects that NASA has for their OpenUniverse simulation they’re running for the upcoming Roman space telescope (see https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-roman-mission-gets-cosmi...), then maybe I could understand why it is so confusing.

As it is, I don’t really understand why it has to be so confusing.

[aragilar]

I'm confused why you think this is confusing? Stellarium is something you use to point a telescope with (and more focused on amateurs), whereas esasky is designed to browse through objects/images/spectra (with science data for scientists)? I don't know how much the overall data would be (given esasky is using a bunch of astronomy standards would be), but we're at least in 100s of PBs here.

[bradknowles]

I don’t see evidence of 100s of PB of data here. I do see multiple green stars, which I know is extremely rare in the real world. That’s just not a common color spectrum for stars.

And using a viewpoint of a large sphere from the outside just seems wrong. It should be viewed from the inside.

[cess11]

https://imgur.com/a/r2n3RMz

Are you really, really sure the hundreds of millions of images &c. it links you to aren't in the hundreds of petabytes in size?

[bradknowles]

I saw no numbers on any of the icons when I visited in my web browser.

It looks like they have a deficient web page design that doesn’t work well on mobile. Thus leading to a much more confusing interface.

[cess11]

It's not for you, obviously. It's for academics and nerds that are interested in these kinds of data sets and used to have much more trouble finding and consuming them.

[bradknowles]

I think if they had a better web page interface, then a lot more people would be able to make use of the site.

And I think that would probably also serve the professional astronomers or astronomical researchers better.

[aadhavans]

Agreed, especially with regards to Stellarium, although this seems more of a researcher's tool than a hobbyist's tool.

There's an excellent web version of Stellarium, if anyone's interested: https://stellarium-web.org/

[sroussey]

Wow, so many Starlink satellites overhead!