References & Credits

Telescope survey images

Some object galleries include locally hosted near-infrared survey fields, labelled “Telescope survey view.” These show the object and its surrounding sky; stars remain unresolved points, and bright stars can show saturation or diffraction artifacts.

This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Colour survey mosaics and cutouts are provided by CDS/Aladin using the 2MASS J, H and K infrared bands. Each gallery links the exact field and gives its angular width. 2MASS archive and documentation.

Universe Finder is built on publicly available astronomy data and open-source software. With gratitude to:

Star & object catalogues

HYG Database — combined Hipparcos, Yale Bright Star and Gliese catalogues; the star positions and distances. Maintained by David Nash / Astronomy Nexus. astronexus.com/hyg
OpenNGC — the Messier, NGC and IC deep-sky catalogue, by Mattia Verga. github.com/mattiaverga/OpenNGC
Stellarium sky cultures — the constellation figure lines (Western). stellarium.org

Object data & imagery

SIMBAD Astronomical Database — CDS, Strasbourg; object identities and properties. simbad.cds.unistra.fr
NASA Image and Video Library — imagery. images.nasa.gov
MAST / STScI — Hubble & JWST archive (observation data). mast.stsci.edu
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. apod.nasa.gov

Software

three.js — WebGL 3D rendering. threejs.org
Vite — build tooling. Hosting on Amazon Web Services (S3, CloudFront, Lambda).

All third-party data and imagery remain the property of their respective owners and are used under their terms. NASA material is generally in the public domain; CDS (SIMBAD) and ESA/Gaia-derived data are free to reuse with attribution. If you are a rights holder and have a concern, contact contact@universefinder.com.