2026 NASA Space Apps Challenge · Planet X and SPHEREx
Scroll the universe.
Discover the unknown.
CosmicFeed is a public feed of real sky pictures from SPHEREx, a NASA mission that photographs the whole sky every six months in infrared light. Objects that move — asteroids, comets, distant worlds — shift position between pictures. No one person can check them all, so this site lets anyone do it: scroll, compare two dates, and flag anything that moves.
No account, no software to install, no experience needed.
Demo video coming soon
A short walkthrough of scrolling, comparing dates and flagging what moves.
01 SCROLL
Views of the sky arrive as posts, one at a time.
02 COMPARE
Blink between dates to see what changed.
03 FLAG
Mark anything that moves for someone to review.
Open the feed
Scroll the sky, no account needed.
The hunt for Planet X
Why SPHEREx could help look for a ninth planet.
Open the Sky Map
See where each picture sits on the sky.
Watch reels
Short clips of what's up this week.
Weekly recap
Every week Orbi the planet and Lumi the moon, our cartoon guides, walk through the latest pictures in 30 seconds.
Where the pictures come from
Every picture in the feed is real SPHEREx data, fetched from NASA/IPAC IRSA and turned into a web picture by two pipelines: one inside the site, and a Python engine for bulk runs. Both pick dates that saw the same patch of sky, line the dates up on one north-up grid, and stretch the faint infrared signal so it is visible on a screen.
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Colour is added for viewing: the shortest infrared band is shown blue, the middle band green, the longest band red. It shows which objects glow at which wavelengths — it is not what your eye would see.
How we stay honest
- Pictures come from NASA data. The only AI-made art on the site is the galaxy on the cover page and the Orbi & Lumi cartoons in the weekly recap, and both are labelled as illustrations.
- A flag is a candidate for review, never a confirmed discovery.
- Every flag is checked against the star and minor-planet catalogues first, so a known object is named instead of mistaken for something new.
- Demo posts are marked, and this project is independent — not operated or endorsed by NASA.
Data sources
What the pictures can't tell you
They are processed for display — background removed, brightness stretched, dates resampled onto one grid — so brightness is not calibrated. SPHEREx pixels are about 6 arcseconds wide, so pictures look soft. Something that looks unknown can be noise, a cosmic ray, or a faint star below the catalogue limit.
Use of Super Intelligence (SI)
For the NASA Space Apps Challenge, here is every place SI tools were used. Anything SI made carries a violet "SI-generated" watermark; real SPHEREx pictures carry an "SI-assisted processing" mark.
- Images & video: Cover illustration, Orbi & Lumi cartoons, the weekly recap animation, the Planet X mission video and each post's Artist Concept picture.
- Audio: Orbi & Lumi's voices and the music in the weekly recap, and the neural voice that reads Night Sky event videos.
- Code & data: Much of the website and image-processing code was written with SI help. "Ask about this image", the admin asteroid check and the Artist Concept descriptions use a language model.
- NASA branding: No SI-made picture, video or sound uses, contains or changes NASA logos, flags or mission identifiers.
SI never makes or edits the SPHEREx sky pictures. They are real data, only resampled, brightness-stretched and coloured by code. No NASA logos, flags or mission patches are made by SI.
Read the full SI disclosure →Code and demo video
Open-source under Apache 2.0 on GitHub . The demo video link has not been added yet — it will appear in the player above.
Attribution
SPHEREx data provided by NASA/JPL-Caltech and IRSA at Caltech/IPAC. CosmicFeed is an independent project, not operated or endorsed by NASA.