3D Heavens Viewer — Watch the Sky Spin

Most astrology software shows you a flat chart wheel. KarmaWheel shows you a flat chart wheel and a 3D model of the actual sky — a celestial sphere with stars, the ecliptic, the equator, the zodiac signs, and all nine planets at their real positions.

You can drag to rotate the view, scrub time forward to watch Jupiter cross from Taurus into Gemini, scrub backward to see where Saturn was when you were a child, or set it to "1 year per second" and watch the slow dance of the heavens.

Why this matters

A 2D chart is an abstraction — a flattened, 12-house diagram of where the planets are at one moment. The 3D Heavens viewer is the actual sky, projected onto a sphere around the observer. Two reasons this is worth your time:

Pattern recognition becomes intuitive. You see with your eyes that Jupiter and Saturn are 90° apart right now — no need to compute the angle. You see that Mars is below the equator while Venus is above. Visual fluency in the sky improves your astrological intuition.
Time becomes visible. The dasha system, transits, eclipse cycles — they're all about how the sky changes through time. Watching it spin makes the rhythm tangible.

What you see

When you open the viewer:

A starfield — 1500 randomly distributed background stars on a sphere around you.
The ecliptic — a faint gold ring marking the Sun's apparent path through the year. This is where all the planets travel (within a few degrees).
The celestial equator — a faint blue ring tilted ~23.5° from the ecliptic (Earth's axial tilt).
The 12 zodiac signs labeled at their mid-sign positions around the ecliptic.
Cardinal markers at 0° Aries, 0° Cancer, 0° Libra, 0° Capricorn (the equinox and solstice points in tropical Western, but here we use sidereal Vedic).
The nine planets — colored spheres with their glyphs, positioned at their real sidereal ecliptic longitude.

Controls

The viewer has three groups of controls:

Rotate the view

Drag with mouse — orbit the camera around the celestial sphere.
Touch and drag on phone — same on mobile.
The view starts looking outward from the center; you're inside the sphere with the sky around you.

Set the time

Date picker — pick any date.
Time picker — pick the time of day (interpreted as your local time).
"Update" button — re-fetch and re-draw the planets at that moment.
"Now" button — jump to the current moment.

Animate time

"1×" button — real-time animation (slow, since the sky changes by ~1° per day for fast planets).
"30 days/sec" button — watch a month go by every second.
"1 yr/sec" button — entire year per second; great for watching Jupiter make its 12-year zodiac circuit.
"Play / Pause" toggle — pause and resume animation.

The bottom of the panel shows colored pills for each planet at the current moment with sign and degrees.

Visual conventions

Each planet has its KarmaWheel color:

Planet	Color	Glyph
Sun	Gold	☉
Moon	Silver	☽
Mars	Red	♂
Mercury	Green	☿
Jupiter	Yellow-gold	♃
Venus	Pink	♀
Saturn	Steel blue	♄
Rahu	Purple	☊
Ketu	Brown	☋

Sphere size doesn't scale to physical size (Jupiter would dwarf everything else). All planets are uniformly sized for legibility.

How positions are computed

The viewer calls the /api/sky_state endpoint, which uses the same Swiss Ephemeris computation as your natal chart. Planet positions are:

Ecliptic longitude (sidereal, Lahiri ayanamsha by default — switchable in Settings).
Right ascension and declination — equatorial coordinates, used to draw planets on the sphere correctly relative to the equator.

The ecliptic and equator rings are tilted relative to each other by 23.4°, matching Earth's axial tilt.

Use cases

See what the sky looked like the day you were born

Set the date to your birthday.
The planets shown are exactly the configuration of your natal chart, but in 3D.

Watch your current major transits

Set the date to today.
Press "1 yr/sec" to fast-forward.
Watch Saturn slowly drift through your natal Moon's sign — that's Sade Sati happening visually.

Study eclipses

Find an eclipse date (try Historical Events).
Scrub to that date.
Notice the Sun and Moon are at the same point near a node (Rahu or Ketu) — that's eclipse geometry made visible.

Verify a chart computation

If your natal chart computation seems off, the 3D viewer is a sanity check. The Sun should be in the right zodiac sign for your birth month; the Moon should be roughly where it should be; planets shouldn't be in absurd locations.

Tips

Drag carefully on mobile — the sphere is sensitive. Small motions = small rotations.
Pause animation before changing date — otherwise the date jumps as you type.
Long sessions stay smooth — the renderer cleans up old data; you can leave it running.

Limitations of v1

This is a v1. Planned upgrades:

Bigger star catalog with proper stellar magnitudes.
Constellation lines to show the visible boundaries of the zodiac signs.
Showing aspect lines (e.g. "Saturn is square Mars right now" drawn as a line between them).
Setting an observer location so the horizon is shown correctly.
Daily / hourly speeds for slow scrubbing through finer events.

In KarmaWheel

Open via Features → 3D Heavens Viewer or the hamburger drawer.

The 3D viewer is currently in beta — Three.js may take a moment to load on slow connections. If it doesn't load, refresh the page and try again.

Astronomy education value

If you've never looked at the sky as an astronomer would, this viewer is a quick way to absorb a lot of fundamental astronomy:

The ecliptic is not the same as the equator — they're tilted.
Planets travel along the ecliptic, not the equator.
The "zodiac signs" are real bands of sky, not just abstract diagram positions.
Some planets are far from the ecliptic (Pluto especially); KarmaWheel's nine all stay close.