Every planet on this site is rendered, not painted. A classification pipeline reads each system’s record from the Open Exoplanet Catalogue, radius, mass, orbit, star, and a procedural shader derives an appearance from it: the same record renders the same world on every visit, and nothing is hand-drawn. The three papers below document how that works, what it can honestly claim, and where it sits in the wider landscape of exoplanet visualisation.
A procedural-visualisation interface to the Open Exoplanet Catalogue
The system paper: how 4,081 catalogued systems become explorable places. The XML-to-JSON pipeline, the Keplerian viewer, stars coloured by blackbody temperature, and a star map built from the catalogue's own astrometry at one parsec per scene unit.
Procedural appearance synthesis for planets no one has seen, and where measurement ends and fiction begins
No exoplanet has ever been resolved as more than a point of light. This paper documents the classification pipeline and procedural shaders that derive each planet's appearance from its recorded parameters, and grades every visible feature as measured, derived, theory-guided or fictive.
What visualisation can and cannot do for the public understanding of exoplanets
Exoplanets are the most pictured objects in science that have never been seen. A survey of the landscape, from press art and NASA's Eyes to planetarium platforms and procedural universes, and an argument that disclosure, not realism, is the axis that matters.