Illustration
Position · proper motion
Nearby stars travel across the sky by a few arcseconds a year. Too slow to see in a night, it adds up across a decade. Barnard's Star moves the width of the full Moon in about 180 years.
Space adventureSky stories · real NASA pictures
The sky is full of wanderers!The sky is never still.
Nearby stars drift across the sky.
Loading the sky…
LiveFind real stars with your phoneSky Compass shows what’s above you, even indoors.
ObservatoryMeet the coldest brown dwarfBlink like an astronomerFlip between real pictures taken years apart.
NewSpace Camera & My Space StorySnap the sky and make a story card. Photos stay on your device.
We only say what the pictures show.
Infrared observatory · 2010 → 2026 · NASA Space Apps 2026
The sky is
never still.
Explore the changing universe through infrared observations from SPHEREx, WISE and Gaia.
Explore the SkyObservatory · watch 16 years of sky change
See it in the skySky Compass · point your phone up
Find where you wereStar Fix · upload a star photo
WANDERERS lines up sixteen years of real infrared images of the same patch of sky, shows you what moved or changed, and lays out the evidence for what each object is.
- Moved, 2010 → 2026
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- Measured motion
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- Gaia DR3 catalogue
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- Distance
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λ 4.6 µm
Research Mode · data access
Every target, its epochs and its files.
- Measured from the WISE and SPHEREx frames by the pipeline
- Catalogue Gaia DR3, or the cited literature (Luhman & Esplin 2016 for WISE 0855)
- Interpretation rule-based class; plain-language text is written by Claude and labelled
| Target | ||||||||
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Rule-based classification.
Each target.json holds the frames, measured track, spectrum, flags and evidence written by pipeline/analyze.py and pipeline/evidence.py. Sources: SPHEREx DR1 and QR3, AllWISE and NEOWISE (NASA/IPAC IRSA); Gaia DR3 (ESA).
A changing universe
Stars drift. Stars flicker. Over years, both are measurable.
Illustration
Brightness · variability
Some stars pulsate, others hide behind passing dust. Comparing the two SPHEREx sky surveys, wavelength by wavelength, shows whether an object brightened or faded between visits.
Observing across time
Two photographs, sixteen years apart. Flip between them and the wanderer gives itself away.
That is how Pluto was found in 1930. WANDERERS does it with infrared images matched by wavelength, so like is compared with like. Pick an epoch on the timeline.
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Epsilon Indi B · 4.6 µm
From motion to evidence · How it works
Every claim is a measurement you can see, checked by a rule you can read.
- i
Flipbook across 16 years
WISE (2010), NEOWISE (2014–2024) and SPHEREx (2025, 2026) images of the same patch, in the 3.4 and 4.6 µm channels.
- ii
Gaia ghosts
Circles mark where every star Gaia DR3 knows should be in each frame. Anything that moves without a ghost is unexplained.
- iii
Measured path
The target's position is measured in every frame and compared with its catalogue proper motion and parallax.
- iv
Infrared fingerprint
Aperture photometry in hundreds of SPHEREx images builds a 0.75–5 µm spectrum. Water, methane and CO/CO₂ bands are marked.
- v
Brightness change
The two SPHEREx sky surveys are compared wavelength by wavelength.
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Evidence card
Stated rules turn the measurements into a classification and a confidence. No black-box score.
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Plain-language explanation
Written by Claude from the measurements only, labelled as AI, with rules against over-claiming.
Evidence cardMeasured
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Infrared fingerprint · Epsilon Indi BSPHEREx DR1
Explore the wanderers
Eleven targets. Many ways the sky changes.
The five NASA Space Apps test objects, from the fastest star in the sky to the coldest known brown dwarf, and six of the Sun's nearest neighbours. Every number below comes from the WANDERERS pipeline or the cited catalogue.
About
Candidates, never discoveries.
WANDERERS was built by Team Hello Universe (Seattle) for the NASA Space Apps Challenge 2026, challenge Planet X and SPHEREx. It points people at interesting objects and shows the evidence. An unmatched object is called a candidate: confirming anything new needs follow-up by astronomers.
Methods follow the IRSA SPHEREx tutorials: per-pixel wavelengths from the WCS-WAVE table, the conservative bad-pixel flag set, 3-pixel aperture photometry with local background.
Data sources
- NASA SPHEREx DR1 + QR3
- 2025–26 images, spectra, brightness change · IRSA
- NASA WISE / AllWISE
- 2010 images at 3.4 and 4.6 µm · IRSA
- NASA NEOWISE
- 2014–2024 single exposures, one image per sky visit · IRSA
- ESA Gaia DR3
- Positions, motions, parallaxes, field-star ghosts
- Luhman & Esplin 2016
- Motion of WISE 0855, too cold for Gaia · AJ 152, 78
- HYG Database v4.1
- Searchable star list · CC BY-SA 4.0
Honest limits
- Bright stars saturate SPHEREx at many wavelengths; those points are dropped and the card says so.
- AllWISE is a 2010–11 coadd, treated as epoch 2010.5.
- Aperture photometry, not PSF fitting: good for spectral shape, not precise absolute flux.