Since no one has explained what esasky is: esasky allows professional astronomers (and anyone else because astronomy is all about open science) to view science observations from observatories across the world in one place.

If you look in the top-left corner you'll see a bunch of controls.

The first one (with three layers) chooses what is displayed. You can choose from loads of surveys (some which cover the whole sky, others that only cover a part) at loads of different wavelengths (and because the sky does change, search for LSST, there's an implicit time aspect as well). These are the original images (ignoring the underlying reduction process each survey does), these are for science not outreach. This is the button to play with (see how the same spot looks in visible vs. radio vs. x-ray).

Next button allows you to pick specific observations (as the all-sky part has implications about how you tessellate images), not that useful unless you understand what you're doing in more details than I have space for.

After that is catalogues of objects. This information will be compiled by survey teams, and is derived from various sources (including other catalogues). The magical astronomy keyword here is "TAP" for Table Access Protocol.

Spectra and timeseries is the next button, you're (generally) looking at spectra/timeseries from individual objects here, but things get more complex here.

The remaining buttons are really of no interest outside the profession sphere (though the multi-messager (i.e. not light, think gravitational waves/neutrinos etc.) button might be interesting when LIGO is running).

(I'm an astronomy RSE, but I don't work on esasky, nor for ESA).

Beautiful, but could do with using quaternions for rotation to avoid gimbal lock. At least I assume that’s the problem with getting stuck on the poles

Not nearly as easy to navigate and discover as apps like Stellarium.

Now, if they had the database with hundreds of terabytes of objects that NASA has for their OpenUniverse simulation they’re running for the upcoming Roman space telescope (see https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-roman-mission-gets-cosmi...), then maybe I could understand why it is so confusing.

As it is, I don’t really understand why it has to be so confusing.

Does anyone know what's the deal with the fairly consistent discoloration of the individual images? The edges are often orange and the middle blue. You'd think they'd colour correct this out when doing the stitching...

Also, are these [0] artefacts a result of adaptive optics since they shine out those lasers to keep track of distortions? And these [1] which seem to be the same but larger and less focused. I remember seeing similar ones on Google Sky years back but never really figured out what causes it.

[0] https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=94.25875681534997%2020.97...

[1] https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=218.7659069213465%20-59.6...

When I scroll out, I would expect to reach a point close to Earth or our solar system, but somehow, I look at a sphere from the outside.

I found some kind of artifact @ 70.3169798 +19.0238259 FOV: 1.3°x2.4°. What is that? Some kind of antenna?

I wish there was something for 3D level of exploration, preferably open source, something like Stellarium but in 3D, something similar to the navigation interface[1] in the Expanse TV series.

[1] https://www.joycenho.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/EXP-Stil...

How fixed is all this? It would be nice if we could scroll through time.

All these stars, and every one of them is unique. It boggles the mind.

"ESASky is an application that allows you to visualise and download public astronomical data."

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The title immediately brought to mind 1980s baseball "star" Nick Esasky (https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/e/esaskni01.shtml)