Grand Tour

A big round of work that landed in October 2026: almost every celestial body got a new look, the physics got stable and faster, and you can now sit back and take the Grand Tour.

🔭 Try it at teskooano.space

Highlights

The Grand Tour

Open the Celestial Hierarchy panel and press Tour. The camera flies between the most interesting bodies in the system and slowly orbits each one, with a card naming the stop and a short note about it. Sol has a curated route; generated systems are walked from the stars outwards through planets, belts, notable moons and comets. Orbit lines, AU markers and every label but the current body’s get out of the way, and dragging the camera pauses the tour. On a phone the hierarchy panel closes so you can see the view.

Stars, black holes and Wolf-Rayet stars

• Stars glow without washing out the planets near them. Phones skip the glow to stay fast.
• A real photosphere for main-sequence stars: limb darkening, boiling granulation, blackbody colour, and an active corona with streamers and prominences tinted to the star’s colour.
• Realistic black holes. A black shadow, the photon ring, a thin accretion disk with Doppler beaming and gravitational redshift, and the sky bent around it. Stars and planets that pass behind the hole are lensed too, and neutron stars bend light around themselves.
• Wolf-Rayet stars are a hot blue-white core inside a dense stellar wind and a clumpy shell of ejected gas.

Planets and moons with real geology

Every rocky planet and moon now has a surface built from its physics and geology: continents and ocean shelves, mountain belts, craters that follow real depth-to-diameter laws, lava-flooded maria, icy cracks, shield volcanoes, polar caps and climate zones with forests, deserts, tundra and sea ice. A quick preview shows the real surface straight away, and full detail arrives as you approach.

• Lava worlds have meandering, glowing fissures and crusted lava lakes in dark basalt instead of a global honeycomb.
• Venus, Titan and other thick atmospheres hide their surface under a cloud or haze deck.
• Atmospheres scatter sunlight the way real air does, and night sides are properly dark.
• The Celestial Uniforms Editor has geology sliders (craters, maria, ice fractures, volcanism, ocean coverage, polar caps) and rebuilds the surface as you change them.

Gas giants and rings

Every gas giant now has uneven latitude bands, zonal jets that carry the clouds, eddies, storms like the Great Red Spot, white ovals and Neptune’s dark spot, Saturn’s polar hexagon, ring shadows on the clouds and moon shadow transits. Rings were rebuilt too: they were about 2.6 times too large and tilted twice. They now have ringlets, the planet’s shadow, light scattered through them from the right side, and Uranus has its real narrow, dark rings.

Comets, asteroids and satellites

• Comets have a matte nucleus inside a soft coma of dust and steam, with tails and jets sized from the nucleus. Nothing on a comet glows or flashes any more.
• Asteroid belts are lumpy, lit rock in realistic sizes and colours, thinner and concentrated towards the mid-plane. The Oort cloud uses the same rock.
• Satellites: the camera can now get right up to the ISS and the James Webb Space Telescope.

The sky

Sol’s sky is a real Milky Way with dust lanes, the Magellanic Clouds and Andromeda at their real positions, and about 24,000 stars with real counts and colours. Every generated system gets its own procedural sky: a galactic disk, a nebula region, the inside of a star cluster, the galactic halo with the whole spiral in view, or intergalactic space.

Physics

• Orbits no longer drift, binary stars start on opposite sides of each other, and Sol’s moons stay stable for years of simulated time.
• Satellites and close moons stay in orbit at any time scale.
• The physics runs about 12 times faster for Sol.
• Collisions and orbit predictions work again.
• Dates and times are handled correctly, and many of Sol’s orbits were corrected.

Interface

• A refreshed look: compact buttons, sliders with an editable value, a tidier Celestial Hierarchy whose Reset and Clear buttons now work.
• The Celestial Info and Uniforms panels follow the view you’re focused on, and the Uniforms editor now works on stars.
• The Physics, Light and Shadow Sources and Engine Info panels show their data again, and closing a panel no longer crashes the app.
• Floating panels and dialogs stay on screen on phones.
• The installed app now updates itself on your next visit instead of keeping an old version.

Faster and steadier

• White dwarfs and giant stars are about 12 times cheaper to draw up close, and asteroid belts take less than half the work, so frames come faster.
• No more crashes or low frame rates on phones.
• Distant bodies no longer jitter, and many flashing and over-bright glows are gone.