Pinch, scroll, or drag up/down on the picture to zoom. Every chip flies you there in a couple of seconds — no five-year trip home.
Drag to orbit the camera, pinch or scroll to zoom. The Sun is carrying everything along as it circles the Milky Way. Exaggerated view squashes the Sun's travel 40× and enlarges the Moon's orbit so you can see the corkscrew. Flip on true proportions to see how stretched-out the real spiral is.
Slow motion hides the pattern. At one second per year nothing seems to happen; crank the speed up and the cosmic web pulls itself together, like a jogger who only makes sense once you stop watching frame by frame. The swirl button is a what-if for your idea: it is not something telescopes have confirmed.
A time machine that only changes the date leaves you at the same spot in space — but Earth was somewhere else then. The red line is Earth's path between your jump date and now. The offset in the card is the space coordinate you'd have to add to land on Earth. There's no single "still" place in space, so pick what your machine holds still against. The galaxy model uses a simple circular orbit, so very long jumps are rough estimates.
How to aim: Mars moves while you fly, so you aim at the empty spot where Mars will be on arrival day. 1) Pick a launch date and flight time. 2) Open the sheet and find "Mars on arrival day" — copy its longitude and distance below (or tap Autofill). 3) Launch and see if you hit.
Planet positions come from NASA JPL's simplified orbit formulas, which work for any date from 1600 to 3000 at the accuracy this map shows. Flight paths count only the Sun's pull, the way first-pass mission planning does; real missions add course corrections.