Eschatia is an interactive web app that pulls live data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope archive and renders it as narrated, deep-zoom explorations of cosmic objects. Users can pan through high-resolution images of stellar nurseries, galaxy clusters, etc.
The last major addition has been made to eschatia, which is ambient mode. Every destination now has a cinematic screensaver you can enter from the viewer.
When in this mode, the image slowly drifts across the screen while a generative audio drone plays underneath. The drone is three notes tuned to an open fifth chord, breathing in and out on a 25-second cycle. It sounds like how being in space probably feels. From the Explore page, “Drift anywhere” chains destinations together automatically, fading to black between them every 15 seconds. I built it as a classroom screensaver feature pretty much.
That brings the full feature list to 20 narrated deep-zoom destinations, interactive hotspots on every image, human-scale comparisons, a live feed of JWST observations from NASA’s archive, and an ambient mode.
Just made a big update. Eschatia now has 20 destinations with points of interest, increased from the original 10. The Discoveries page is also now live, and the landing page has been adjusted in its ui.
The Discoveries page pulls live data from NASA’s JWST archive and surfaces the 40 most recent science observations in Eschatia’s visual language. Getting the API working took several rounds of debugging. The endpoint I expected returned a 404, the response structure was different from the documentation, and the edge function couldn’t read environment variables until I switched runtimes.
The landing page starfield got rebuilt from scratch. The original was 200 CSS-animated divs. The new one is a canvas animation where stars fly toward the viewer from a central vanishing point, like warping through space. I tried star trails first but they made the background too noisy, so I pulled them back to crisp dots which ended up looking cleaner anyway.
The images on eschatia are now spatially interactive. Users can now click on glowing pins on the viewer and get detailed information of that part of the image. 6/10 images are complete with the hotspots and information, along with comparisons. I also created the Explore page to show all 10 of the possible destinations.
Most of this phase went smoothly, but I spent forever trying to fix the back button from the viewer. Every time I would click it, the home page was left with a black overlay, and it took me a long time to track down the issue. The problem was that the viewer had its own cleanup process when shutting down, and it was conflicting with another component that was trying to reference the viewer as it was disappearing.
4 of the destinations still need content, and then after that, I need to create a live discovery feed and do some more checks before I can ship an MVP.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has some of the most detailed images of the universe ever taken, but the best experience for those who are not scientists is only the JPEG image with a caption.
The idea of Eschatia is to create a more interactive way to view these images in the web portal, where users can pick a destination and get full information and narration about the JWST’s greatest images in plain English.
Before writing any code, I spent some time figuring out what info NASA made available to developers. I was able to find huge images on ESA’s servers with key images like the Carina Nebula available with over 100 megapixels and metadata. This made it really easy to make the experience interactive, as users can zoom into these images deeply without the quality being compromised. Finding this was the major change that made the whole project possible without any custom infrastructure, etc.
After I started building, the trickiest part to figure out was an entry transition. When you click a destination card, the app captures the card’s exact position on screen and animates it expanding to fill the entire viewport before cutting to the viewer. Making it smooth was difficult, and it’s still not perfect yet, but I will improve it after the initial MVP of the product with all the features has been created.
The website skeleton, transition, and viewer with some images are all live right now at eschatia.vercel.app
There is a full viewer and narration for 3 of the destinations. Next up is making the images more interactive with clickable regions that have more narration, and adding in more images that viewers can view, along with making sure that all the buttons on the website work.
