About Swayanta

Swayanta is a free journey through real space, made from a date of birth. Its idea is the line on every page: you are nature. The sky you were born under was real, the light of the day you were born is still travelling, and most of the atoms you are made of were made inside stars. Swayanta shows this with real astronomy, in a way you can feel rather than study.

How it works

The sky you were born under

Star positions and distances come from the HYG database. The Astronomy Engine library works out where the Moon and the planets were on your birth date, the Moon's phase, and the constellation it was passing through. It is the sky of that whole night, the one everyone on Earth shared, so no birth time or place is needed.

Your light

Light travels one light-year every year, so the light of the day you were born is now as many light-years from Earth as you are years old. Every star closer than that, it has reached. The journey counts them, and shows how old you were as it passed the famous ones.

Your birthday star

Your birthday star is the brightest named star whose distance in light-years is within about a year and a half of your age. The light from it arriving now set out around the year you were born. In the first four years of a life there is none yet: the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away.

Your numbers

Seconds alive are exact. Heartbeats and breaths use published averages: about 100,000 heartbeats a day (Cleveland Clinic), and about 20,000 breaths a day, from a resting rate of 12 to 15 breaths a minute (American Lung Association). Your own will differ a little.

None of this is astrology. Swayanta says nothing about your character or your future: only where things really were, and how far light has really gone.

Credits

Swayanta is built on the generous work of others:

• Stars: HYG Database, David Nash, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Sky positions: Astronomy Engine, Don Cross, MIT License
• Moon: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio
• Earth: NASA Visible Earth (Blue Marble, Earth's City Lights)
• Milky Way: ESO/S. Brunier, CC BY 4.0
• Space images: ESO, ESO, ESO/O. Maliy, CC BY 4.0
• 3D: three.js, MIT License
• Fonts: Inter, Rasmus Andersson, and Playfair Display, Claus Eggers Sørensen, SIL Open Font License

Privacy

There are no accounts and no database. Your journey is made from the date in its link, and your poster is drawn on your own device.

To know how many people visit, the site uses GoatCounter, which sets no cookies and is told only which page was opened and in which language, never a birthday or a name. Shared journeys are kept out of search engines.

If you choose to support Swayanta, that happens on Ko-fi's own page.

Enter your date of birth.