Sources and credits

Main references

• NASA Science

  Planet, Sun, Moon and mission reference pages used for educational descriptions and object details.

  science.nasa.gov
• NASA and ESA mission pages

  Mission context for spacecraft such as Hubble, James Webb, Landsat, Terra, Aqua, Chandra and XMM-Newton.

  nasa.gov
• ESA/Hubble and ESA/Webb imagery

  Image sources linked inside telescope detail galleries where relevant.

  esahubble.org
• JPL Horizons

  Reference ephemeris service available for maintenance checks against Celesiq's local solar-system position calculations.

  JPL Horizons API documentation
• OpenStreetMap Nominatim

  Geocoding support may be used when the site is hosted online and a visitor enters a place name.

  nominatim.org
• Natural Earth and open geographic boundaries

  World map coastlines and borders are rendered from simplified geographic data for fast browser display.

  naturalearthdata.com

Image and mission credits

Object detail windows include source links for images and mission references. To keep Celesiq fast and reliable, object photos are intended to be cached locally instead of hotlinked from third-party image servers. The source links point visitors to official mission pages, public image releases or educational references. If an image credit needs correction, please use the contact page so the source can be updated.

Calculation note

The map and event tools are approximate and optimized for visual explanation. They should be checked against official ephemerides or mission data when exact predictions matter. The solar-system map includes a developer validation script that can compare the local planet positions with JPL Horizons vectors.

Earth–Mars Distance Calculator

The Mars distance explorer uses Astronomy Engine 2.1.19 locally under its MIT license. Geometric Earth-center and Mars-center distances were checked against JPL Horizons vectors at twelve UTC epochs from 2000 to 2050. See the article’s method section for the measured differences and limitations.

Astronomy Engine source and documentation · JPL Horizons reference

Planet Distance Ranking

The closest-planet explorer and Mars distance page share one Astronomy Engine 2.1.19 vector/distance core. The seven-planet ranking was checked against 56 JPL Horizons distances at eight UTC epochs from 2000 to 2050. The fixed mean-distance comparison is an arithmetic mean of 18,628 daily local calculations over 2000–2050, not a current ranking.

JPL Horizons reference · Physics Today’s analysis of mean distances