This was my recent weekend project, aimed at teaching me JavaScript, a bit of HTML5, and (mostly) WebGL. The orbital data are from NASA JPL. I was inspired in part by this Flash app: http://www.dynamicdiagrams.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/or..., but wanted to do something in 3D.

Coming from the games-dev world, this is my first introduction to web coding. The UI is jquery. I mostly used http://learningwebgl.com/blog for the 3D stuff. Being WebGL, it will work mostly on Chrome, Firefox 4 Beta. Forget about IE.

I needed to figure out how to render text to the WebGL canvas - I won't say I have the perfect solution, but the general approach is to use a conventional HTML5 canvas, then copy it once per frame into a WebGL texture. There's something funky going on in this process - the textures get corrupted, and resizing the window leads to slowdown.

For the future I'd like to make the planets clickable and zoomable, maybe put in a search box to zoom to objects of interest. I'd like to build it up to a full catalogue of the Solar System - comets, the larger asteroids, dwarf planets - and maybe add the capability to put in known space mission trajectories.