Choose a real star. Write 280 characters. Keep the card.
Every point on this map is a real object, in its real place, at its real distance. Nothing here is invented. The colours are the colours those stars actually are — hot blue, our own yellow, the dim red of dwarfs too faint to see.
The moment is recorded, and you are given a card. The card shows where your message would be now if it had left at the speed of light: past Jupiter within the hour, beyond the planets in a day, out of the Sun's reach in a few weeks, and after that among stars whose names it can tell you. Open it again in a year and it will have moved.
No transmitter is involved. Nothing physical leaves Earth. The distance is a true calculation of a journey that light never actually began — and it is written that way on purpose, because the alternative is a lie, and a lie would spoil it.
Because of the arithmetic. Twenty-five light-years to Vega sounds like nothing until you write something to someone you have lost, and read that it arrives in 2051. The sky is the only place left where distance still means something.
Branislav Kuga, an emergency doctor in Serbia, out of love for astronomy. It is free, it will stay free of advertising, and it sells nothing. The data comes from astronomers who gave their life's work away — they are thanked on the credits page. If the site meant something to you, there is a tip jar in the corner — but nothing here is for sale, and nothing is behind it.
The same person made a wall where anyone can leave a message to the world, a wall for saying
thank you, and a collection of dresses that do not exist:
leaveittotheworld.com ·
globalwallofgratitude.com ·
bestiarium.pages.dev