The strip draws every planet, moon and gap at one scale: nothing is enlarged. Worlds smaller than a few pixels get a tick; things far too small to draw, like asteroids and Voyager 1, get a marker instead. Lineup puts each planet at its average distance from the Sun; the planets never really line up. Today uses their real distances now. The Flight is a film: sizes are enlarged, distances shortened and the sky brightened.
The Flight’s sky is real: every star, galaxy and nebula sits at its true place. The Milky Way and its galaxies are NASA’s map, lightly smoothed and brightened like a long-exposure photograph; stars are drawn by brightness, the brightest with spikes as in a telescope photograph. Nebulae are drawn glows, sized by their catalogue size and fading out beyond it: their colour follows the gas they glow with, their inner detail is illustrative, and those with no measured orientation are drawn round. Nothing in the sky moves by itself; all the motion is the camera’s. In the Flight each world is filmed beside a landmark chosen for the view (not with reduced motion or Save-Data, where the camera keeps its cruise view), and the lighting stays true for that angle. Landmark distances: NASA Hubble Messier and Caldwell pages, a NASA Hubble news release, NASA Earth Observatory and ESA.
Belt specks are synthetic, shaped like the real belts; the Kuiper field has no measured edge here. Pluto’s colour is a stand-in, not a measured colour. Distances and sizes: NASA fact sheets. Voyager 1 and Pluto: JPL Horizons. Speed of light: NIST.
Maps: Solar System Scope (CC BY 4.0) and NASA 3D Resources. Stars: HYG database (CC BY-SA 4.0). Milky Way: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Deep-sky objects: OpenNGC (CC BY-SA 4.0). Type: Bodoni Moda and Martian Mono (OFL). Engine: three.js (MIT).