Space Voyage — a cinematic space screensaver_
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A voyage, not a loop
Three missions
Keyboard shortcuts
Made for big screens
Guide — a voyage through space in six steps
Everything renders live on your graphics card. No video, no download.
Open the page and it is already flying: a nebula, streaming stars and, usually, a planet ahead. Now and then a ship, the Voyager probe or the Golden Record drifts by.
Free voyage stays calm, Space opera adds fleets, skirmishes and a story crawl, the Voyager Grand Tour follows the real probes. Key M.
N ship flyby, B skirmish, V Voyager, G Golden Record, P Pale Blue Dot, C story crawl — any time, in any mission.
Speed, star density, nebula strength, how often the ship jumps (15–120 s, or off) and how many scenes appear. J jumps right now.
Click the view or press F. The cursor and buttons fade away; move the mouse to bring them back, Esc to leave. L adds cinema bars.
Set Start after idle and leave the tab open: after that many minutes without input it takes over the window. Any key or mouse move wakes it.
What you are looking at
- nebula
- layered noise in two colours, with dark dust lanes
- planet
- gas giant or rocky world, lit by the sector’s sun
- rings
- banded, with the planet’s shadow across them
- sun
- glare and lens-flare ghosts, hidden behind the planet
- Tideline
- twin-hull carrier with escorts and a jump-out
- Lance
- long cruiser with energy sails
- Kestrel
- forward-swept fighters
- Wasp
- dark raiders with a red core
- crawl
- a new story chapter for every sector
- probe
- 10-sided bus, 3.7 m dish, RTG boom and science boom
- record
- the gold-plated Golden Record
- tour
- Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, interstellar space
- live
- distance and signal time of Voyager 1
- spool
- 2 s: stars start to stretch
- jump
- about 3 s of streaks and a blue tunnel
- arrive
- a flash, then a brand-new sector
- F
- full screen
- Space
- pause
- J
- jump now
- M
- mission
- N B V G P C
- play a scene
- L
- cinema bars
- H / S
- HUD / sound
The space voyage screensaver, explained
Space Voyage is a cinematic space screensaver that runs in your browser. You cruise through a sector of space — a coloured nebula, thousands of stars, often a planet with an atmosphere and rings — and every half minute or so the ship spools up, jumps through hyperspace and arrives somewhere new. On top of the scenery there are now three missions: a calm free voyage, a space opera with original fleets, and the Voyager Grand Tour, which follows the real Voyager probes. Nothing is a pre-recorded video and there is nothing to install.
Space opera: an original fleet
In the Space opera mission the sky fills with ships that exist only here. The Tideline-class carrier is a twin-hull ship with a command spine, a teal stripe and six engines; it crosses the view with a handful of Kestrel fighters on its wings and, at the end, stretches into a streak and jumps away. The Lance-class cruiser is a long spear with swept energy sails, the Needle courier is a small, fast dispatch boat, and the bulk hauler is a slow tug pushing four cargo modules. In a skirmish, five Kestrels weave against the dark Wasp raiders while green and red bolts cross the sky, raiders explode and are replaced, and a carrier burns in the distance. Radio chatter appears as captions, a sector chart hologram turns in the corner, and every few jumps a golden story crawl opens a new chapter of the voyage log. The ships, the Meridian Fleet, the Cinder Pact and the story are all original; this is an independent project and is not affiliated with any film studio.
The Voyager Grand Tour
The Voyager Grand Tour mission visits five stops in order, each with the real dates and a few facts, while a model of the Voyager spacecraft turns slowly in the foreground. The probe is built from the real design: a ten-sided bus, the 3.7-metre high-gain dish, the boom with the three RTG power sources, the science boom with the scan platform, the magnetometer boom and the long plasma-wave antennas (the booms are shortened for the picture).
| Stop | Craft | Closest approach | What it found |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jupiter | Voyager 1 · Voyager 2 | 5 Mar 1979 · 9 Jul 1979 | volcanoes on Io, a faint ring, the Great Red Spot up close |
| Saturn | Voyager 1 · Voyager 2 | 12 Nov 1980 · 26 Aug 1981 (UTC) | thousands of ringlets and spokes, a haze-covered Titan |
| Uranus | Voyager 2 | 24 Jan 1986 | ten new moons, two new rings, a planet tipped on its side |
| Neptune | Voyager 2 | 25 Aug 1989 | the Great Dark Spot, six new moons, geysers on Triton |
| Interstellar space | Voyager 1 · Voyager 2 | Aug 2012 · Nov 2018 | the heliopause crossed; the Golden Record; the Pale Blue Dot |
The Golden Record is shown as a spinning gold-plated disc: each Voyager carries one with 115 images, greetings in 55 languages, about 90 minutes of music and the sounds of Earth. The Pale Blue Dot scene re-creates the photograph Voyager 1 took on 14 February 1990 from about 6 billion kilometres away, in which Earth is less than one pixel in a band of scattered sunlight. Whenever Voyager 1 is on screen a panel shows its distance, speed and one-way signal time. NASA expects Voyager 1 to reach one light-day from Earth on 18 November 2026, at about 173 astronomical units; the readout is a simple model anchored to that figure and growing by about 3.57 AU per year, so it can be off by a fraction of an AU. Dates and facts come from NASA and JPL.
How it is rendered
The background is drawn by one fragment shader on your graphics card, recalculated for every pixel on every frame:
- The nebula is fractal noise (fbm) whose coordinates are bent by a second layer of noise — domain warping — which gives the clouds their swirls. A third noise layer carves out dark dust lanes.
- The stars you fly past live in seven depth layers. Each layer scales up as it comes towards you and fades out as it passes; during a jump each star is drawn as a line segment pointing back to the centre, which is what turns points into streaks.
- The planet is ray-traced: each pixel’s viewing ray is tested against a sphere, the hit point gets a normal, and that normal is lit by the sector’s sun. Gas giants get turbulent bands and a storm (a big oval for Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a dark one for Neptune); rocky worlds get continents, oceans with a sun glint, ice caps and drifting clouds. A Fresnel term adds the bright atmospheric rim, and a halo glows just outside the edge.
- The rings are a ray–plane intersection with banded noise and a gap, drawn in front of or behind the planet depending on distance, and darkened where the planet’s shadow falls on them.
- Finally a filmic tone map, a vignette and a touch of film grain keep bright stars from clipping and make the frame feel like a camera shot.
The ships, the Voyager probe, laser bolts, explosions and moons are drawn on a second layer by a small software 3D engine that shares the shader’s camera, so they sit in the same space as the nebula and planet: every face is flat-shaded by the sector’s sun and sorted back to front, engines glow additively, and objects behind the planet are cut off by its disc.
What happens in a hyperspace jump
The jump is a small state machine: cruise (the planet slowly grows as you approach), spool (two seconds of stars stretching), jump (full warp: streaks, a blue tunnel, the old sector fading out) and arrive (a white flash and the new sector). The new sector is created halfway through the jump, while the screen is full of streaks, so you never see it swap. Any scene in progress ends when the drive spools up.
Missions and regions
| Key | Setting | Look |
|---|---|---|
| M | Free voyage | nebulae, planets, rare cameos of ships, the Voyager probe and the Golden Record |
| M | Space opera | fleets, skirmishes, radio chatter, sector chart and a story crawl every few jumps |
| M | Voyager Grand Tour | Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and interstellar space, about 45 seconds each |
| 1 | Auto | mixes all regions, changes every jump |
| 2 | Nebula | magenta, violet and teal clouds |
| 3 | Ember | orange and deep-red clouds, warm suns |
| 4 | Glacier | cyan, blue and white, icy planets |
| 5 | Void | near-black space, faint clouds, sharp stars |
Share a sector
Every sector comes from a number. The address bar always shows it as ?sector=…, and Share sector copies that link: whoever opens it starts in exactly the same place, with the same nebula, planet and sun — and the same ships, because scenes are seeded by the sector number. The Voyager tour uses ?mission=tour&stop=2, where stop is the stop to start at.
Performance and quality
On Auto quality the page watches its own frame rate. If it drops below about 42 frames per second it renders at a lower internal resolution and scales the picture up; when there is headroom again it sharpens back up. Low, Medium and High fix the resolution and the number of noise layers yourself. If you only want scenery, set Scenes & cameos to Off. It needs WebGL, which every current browser has; on battery, laptops may slow animation down to save power. With reduce motion enabled in your system, scenes only play when you start them.
Using it as a real screensaver
A web page cannot register itself as your operating system’s screensaver, but it can behave like one. Choose Start after idle (1 to 30 minutes) and leave the tab open: when nothing has touched the keyboard or mouse for that long, the voyage fills the window and hides the cursor, and the first key press or mouse move brings the page back — that first input is swallowed so it does not click anything. For a TV or second monitor, open the page there and press F.
Sound
Sound is off until you switch it on. It is synthesised live in the browser: a slow, filtered drone for cruising, a rising rush with a low thump for every jump, soft radio beeps, laser and explosion sounds in battles, and a slow original pad under the story crawl.
Privacy
The voyage is computed entirely on your device. Your settings (speed, region, mission, toggles) are kept in your browser’s local storage, and nothing you do is uploaded. The page loads its font from Google Fonts and counts visits with cookie-free Simple Analytics.