Perigee — impossible skies, at honest scale
Perigee is an interactive night sky that lets you move a planet, a star or a galaxy as close to Earth as you like, and shows you exactly how much of the sky it would fill. Apparent size is never art-directed: it is calculated from the object's real diameter and the distance you choose, so Saturn at the Moon's distance comes out the size the geometry says it should.
Nine objects, five distances each, and four places to stand. Pick a sky and watch it arrive.
Objects you can bring closer
Guided encounters
Each encounter is a short, narrated sequence that moves one object inward a step at a time, with an optional guess before the sky answers.
- Saturn at the Moon's distance
- Saturn at the edge of the world
- When Betelgeuse takes the sky
- The Moon approaches
- The galaxy hiding in our sky
Where you stand
The same sky reads differently from different ground. Perigee offers Rooftop — a quiet city roof after dark, Hilltop — a low meadow at the edge of evening, Lakeside — still water beneath an open horizon and Cabo da Roca — atlantic cliffs beneath portugal's western lighthouse.
How the sizes are calculated
Every apparent size in Perigee comes from the same formula applied to published diameters and distances, and every figure on the site is derived rather than typed in. Perigee is deliberately not a planetarium catalogue or a physics simulator: it states plainly what is calculated, what is a rendered visualization, and what is described but not simulated. Read how Perigee calculates apparent size.