See the infrared sky change.
NASA's SPHEREx maps the whole sky every six months in 102 colours of infrared light. Pick any spot to flip through its images over time, like a flip-book of the sky. Moving or changing objects stand out: asteroids, comets, variable stars, maybe a planet nobody has found yet.
The real infrared sky (NASA/IPAC 2MASS) with SPHEREx's coverage glowing on top. The bright band is our Milky Way. Tap anywhere to open that patch of sky; scroll or pinch to zoom. Ecliptic: where planets, asteroids and comets travel.
Start here: famous places to watch
Chase a moving world
Time Machine
Choose a target to see every SPHEREx image of it, in order of time.
Pick a spot on the sky map or use the search box above.
Target
Each SPHEREx pixel covers 6.2″ of sky. The telescope trades sharpness for 102 infrared colours over the whole sky. Turn off “Smooth display” to see the raw pixels.
Chase a moving object
Planets, dwarf planets, asteroids and comets drift against the stars. SkyShift uses NASA/JPL orbits to find every SPHEREx image that caught them, then plays them back following the object.
Live from SPHEREx
Read straight from NASA's public SPHEREx archive (IRSA on AWS) by your own browser, right now. No middleman. New observations arrive every week.
Newest observing periods in the archive
Latest frames
Tap Develop to pull the centre of a brand-new frame from the archive (~2 MB) and see where on the sky it was taken.
The SPHEREx mission, in numbers
Images taken per day
102 colours of infrared, in 6 detector bands
Data freshness
SPHEREx news from NASA
NASA Image Library: SPHEREx
Asteroids passing close to Earth (next 90 days, NASA/JPL CNEOS)
Saved & offline
Targets you save are stored on this device and open even in airplane mode.
Saved targets
My finds
Candidates you flagged while hunting. Export them to share with astronomers.
Storage on this device
How SkyShift works
1 · Pick a place
Click the sky map, choose a featured target, or search for a name (stars, galaxies, nebulae, planets, asteroids, comets) or coordinates (83.82 -5.39, 05:35:17 -05:23:28, or galactic l=0 b=0).
2 · Watch it change
Movie plays every image in time order. Blink flips between two dates, the same trick Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto in 1930. Difference subtracts them so only changes light up. Colour turns infrared into a false-colour picture. Then & now compares with NASA's WISE/NEOWISE (2010–2020) and 2MASS (1997–2001) skies at matching wavelengths.
3 · Measure & hunt
The Spectrum chart shows how bright the object is at each infrared wavelength: water ice, carbon dioxide and dust leave fingerprints here. The Hunt tool looks for anything that moved or changed and checks it against 55,000+ known asteroids and comets from NASA/JPL.
What is SPHEREx?
The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer is a NASA space telescope launched in March 2025. Every six months it maps the entire sky in 102 near-infrared colours (0.75–5 µm). Each image covers 3.5°×3.5° (about 7 full Moons across) with 6.2″ pixels.
Its special filters (linear variable filters) change colour across the detector, so as the telescope steps across the sky each star is photographed in many colours. Put together, they give a spectrum of every object, more than a billion of them.
Why "Planet X"?
Anything in our Solar System shifts position between images taken days or months apart. Nearby stars and brown dwarfs creep too. A cold, distant planet would be faint in visible light but could glow in the infrared, which is exactly what SPHEREx sees.
Tips for spotting real changes
- Compare like with like. Choose one band (e.g. band 3) so the colour is similar between dates.
- Asteroids move fast, usually appearing in only one image of a visit. Slow, distant objects (Kuiper Belt) shift a few pixels per day.
- Cosmic rays and hot pixels are single sharp dots, sharper than any star, and they never show up twice. SPHEREx photographs each patch of sky with two detectors at the same instant and again minutes later; Hunt only believes a source that reappears there, then checks SPHEREx's own pixel-quality flags.
- Bright stars leave ghosts and halos. A real object looks like a star (same fuzzy shape) and moves in a straight line.
- Check the Hunt list. If it says "Known", that's an asteroid or comet already catalogued by NASA/JPL.
- Flashes are real but brief. Seen by both twin detectors at the same instant, then gone minutes later: a flaring star or sunlight glinting off a satellite. Hunt lists them as "Flash", not as discoveries.
- Young stars flicker and nebulae have knots. Hunt compares each find with 2MASS (1997–2001) and WISE (2010–2020): "Variable?" means something was already there, "Nebula" means it sits in bright gas. A new object shows nothing in either.
Install on any device
Android (any phone): tap Install at the top. In Chrome it installs in one tap. In other browsers, choose Install with Chrome: other browsers build installed apps from an old Android template that Android warns about, and Chrome avoids that. No Chrome? Add SkyShift as a home-screen shortcut from your browser's menu.
iPhone & iPad (all models, iOS 11.3+): in Safari tap Share → Add to Home Screen. On iOS 16.4+ this also works from Chrome and Edge.
Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS (Chrome/Edge): click Install at the top or the install icon in the address bar. Safari on Mac: File → Add to Dock.
Offline / airplane mode: once opened, the app itself works without a connection. Use Save offline on any target to keep its images on your device.
Where the data comes from
- SPHEREx images: NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), read live from its public AWS bucket by your browser.
- SPHEREx image catalogue: IRSA TAP service, re-indexed automatically every 6 hours.
- Asteroid & comet orbits, ephemerides, close approaches: NASA/JPL Solar System Dynamics (SBDB, Horizons, CNEOS).
- Exoplanet hosts: NASA Exoplanet Archive.
- News & images: NASA.gov and the NASA Image and Video Library.
- Then & now: NASA WISE/NEOWISE (unWISE) and 2MASS sky surveys via CDS HiPS. Name lookup: CDS Sesame.
This publication makes use of data products from the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx), which is a joint project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, and is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. SPHEREx data DOI: 10.26131/IRSA652. SkyShift is an independent project and is not endorsed by NASA.
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