Hands-on
The Butterfly in Your Hand
The Butterfly Nebula floats at arm's length: two torn wings of teal and lavender gas round a dark lane. Turn it and the lane shifts; step inside it; replay the eruption.
Drag with one finger to turn it like a ball; pinch to make it bigger or smaller. Tap for its controls: the time slider and ▶ replay how it formed, the filter button swaps Both, Hα and O III, Step inside grows it round you, and Wind lets a swipe blow through the gas.
- The idea
- NGC 6302, the Butterfly: thousands of clumps thrown out in two hollow cones, the farther the faster, stretched into filaments by turbulence, round a star of about 220,000 K hidden behind a ring of dust. The dust ring really absorbs light on the way to your eye. Each clump is drawn as the streak a frozen flow would stretch it into, so it is a little dimmer and flatter than a full simulation; the time axis is compressed; your wind is a ripple.
- With music
- It doesn't react to the music: it moves by itself, in silence too. Tap Demo beat for our own beat, or Your music to let it hear the room.
- How it runs
- It’s the same live simulation as in the Everdust apps, running in your browser on WebGL 2. If your device struggles, it lowers the detail a step at a time to keep the motion smooth.
This is just a taste
Loved The Butterfly in Your Hand? There are many more worlds in the app.
The Everdust app has every world at full detail, plus games made of physics, stories you step inside, Create (turn any photo into a world), and hand tracking on Vision Pro and Quest. Free during the beta.