Every star you see is a real object from a natural history collection, shared openly by its museum.
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Kosmos, the sky of science.
Here every star is a real object from a natural history collection: a meteorite, a fossil, a pressed plant, a bird. They lie along a river of time, from the oldest stones to the living world. The living groups stand on its banks, each beside the period of its oldest fossil in this sky. That shows what this collection holds, not when a group first lived. A wormhole leads back to the sky of art.
An Art & Science project byMarcel Moonen
Do you work for a museum, a natural history collection or another institution with an open collection? Write to me, and it could become the next galaxy.
Marcel Moonen · 2026 ·
© 2026 auriaan.com · Launched 31 October 2026 · All rights reserved.
Auriaan is a non-commercial Art & Science project by
Marcel Moonen
Müllerwis 9
8606 Greifensee
Switzerland
Contact: [email protected]
marcelmoonen.com
Auriaan has no accounts, no advertising and no tracking cookies. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which stores nothing in your browser and does not identify individual visitors. It shows only totals, such as the number of visits and the countries they come from.
The website is hosted by Cloudflare, which processes technical data such as IP addresses to deliver and protect the site.
Images are loaded directly from the museums’ own servers, so your browser connects to them when you view an object.
Your settings (brightness, colour, language) are stored only in your own browser.
Objects you collect and the name you give your constellation are kept in your own browser. When you share a constellation, its list of objects and its name are stored with Cloudflare so that the link works; they are kept without a time limit.
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Cloudflare and Stripe may also process data outside Switzerland, for example in the USA; both take part in the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework.
If you write to us, your email is used only to reply.
Concept, design and realisation: Marcel Moonen. Reading aloud: your browser's own voices (in the Windows app, Kokoro). Graphics: three.js. Built with the help of Claude (Anthropic).
All objects are shown from the open collections of the museums named with each object, under the licence stated there (CC0). Design and code of Auriaan © Marcel Moonen.