Estrellas
2018
Custom real-time software
Orbitas is a meditation on scale. The camera begins in close orbit around Earth, familiar and navigable, the blue surface and its Moon. Then it drifts: past the inner planets, past Jupiter and Saturn, until the Sun has become a bright star among stars and Earth has disappeared into the field of light. Then it turns and returns.
What Carl Sagan called the pale blue dot, Earth photographed from six billion kilometers by Voyager 1 in 1990, lasts only a moment in this journey. But that moment is what the work is built toward. The entire solar system, deployed to show you how small one planet is, before the camera comes back to orbit it.
As the camera moves, its reference point shifts: Earth at the center, then the Sun at the center, the perspective of the inhabitant alternating with the perspective of the system. Behind each body, trails of light accumulate, tracing their paths since the beginning of the year. The longer you watch, the more of the year becomes visible as geometry: Mercury's tight ellipse traced many times over, the outer planets barely moved. Time is encoded in the length of the trail.
Built on Hypatia, the astronomical computation library developed across a decade of learning to calculate stellar and planetary positions, Orbitas is both instrument and invocation: exact in its data, unhurried in its drift.
It continues a thread that runs from LUNA (2017) through ESTRELLAS (2018), Weaver (2025–2026), and Astros (2026), all built from the same impulse: to make the scale of where we are something felt, not only known.
