THE GRAND
Orrery
Eight planets, a restless star, a belt of shattered rock and the frozen frontier beyond — rendered in miniature, set in motion, and yours to wander.
The Grand Orrery is a hand-built model of our solar system, drawn in the style of an antique astronomical atlas and powered by a native Metal renderer. Twenty-five worlds — the Sun, every planet, Pluto, and fifteen notable moons — spin and orbit in real time. Choose any of them and the camera sweeps you to its sunlit side while its field-guide dossier slides up.
- Every world's surface is generated on your own device — except Earth, which wears NASA's own Blue Marble portrait.
- Every figure in every dossier verified against NASA and JPL references, with sources cited in the app.
- The Grand Tour: sit back while the orrery visits each world in turn.
- A quiet, generated ambient soundscape — leave it on or switch it off.
- Works completely offline. Collects nothing.
$2.99, once. The whole solar system.
Travel in time. The speed control now has a stop in the middle. Push it right and the solar system runs forward; pull it left and it runs backward, every orbit and rotation reversing, faster the further you go. Stop at the center, tap the date, and jump to any day between 1800 and 2050.
And the positions are real. Every planet is placed from NASA JPL's orbital elements, so the arrangement you see on a given date is the arrangement the sky actually had. Orbits are true ellipses, so worlds quicken as they near the Sun and slow as they leave it — and Pluto's path dips inside Neptune's, exactly as it did from 1979 to 1999. Find the day you were born. Watch the planets line up. Then run it backward and watch it come apart.
One honest note, the same one the app makes in its own Sources screen: orbit spacing is compressed so that Mercury and Pluto can share a screen. Every angle and every orbit shape is real; the distances between the orbits are not to scale.
The Grand Orrery is one universal app. Buy it once and it runs on all three, at no extra cost and with nothing to subscribe to.
- iPhone — portrait and landscape, with the dossier as a card you can drag, and the speed control always within reach of your thumb.
- iPad — the whole system fills the screen in all four orientations, with type and controls scaled for the larger canvas and higher-resolution worlds.
- Mac — a resizable window with full-screen support, a real menu bar and keyboard shortcuts. Space pauses, ← and → run time backward and forward, . stops it, ⌘G goes to a date, and O, L and T toggle orbits, labels and the Grand Tour. Scroll to zoom.
Questions, corrections, or trouble with the app — write to GenshiMediaGroup@gmail.com and a human will answer.
Privacy: the app collects nothing at all. The short version is the whole version — read the privacy policy.