TheGalaxyDB is a living galactic encyclopedia assembled from five public astronomical datasets: SDSS DR17, HyperLEDA, HECATE, PGC2003, and Mangrove. 22.4 million galaxies, each carrying whatever the union of those sources can provide — morphology, redshift, distance, stellar mass, and star formation rate. Every galaxy is rendered live in your browser using GLEN, the Galaxy Engine 2 — Dev Sandbox — a custom WebGL renderer that produces morphologically-accurate galaxy visualizations with physically-derived structure.
GLEN stands for Galactic Layer & Environment Navigator. Where STEN (the Star Engine, powering TheStarDB) renders individual stellar objects, GLEN operates at galactic scale. It characterises a galaxy's morphological class, inclination, bar strength, spiral arm winding, and integrated color, then produces a real-time rendering that reflects those measured parameters. Spiral arms tighten from Sa to Sc. Bars strengthen through SBa to SBc. Ellipticals shift from compact E0 to flattened E7. What you see in GLEN is what the data says — not what an artist imagined.
Sb Spiral Galaxy · GLEN Render
Each morphological class has a dedicated shader in GLEN — from tight-wound Sa spirals to E0 compact ellipticals to chaotic irregulars shaped by ancient collisions.
HyperLEDA catalogs over four million galaxies but only carries morphological T-types for roughly 60,000 of them — leaving 3.94 million with no structural classification. NASA/IPAC NED indexes approximately three billion source entries, the overwhelming majority typed simply “Galaxy” with no morphology, stellar mass, or star formation rate. Nobody has filled this gap at the scale of 22 million objects with computed physical properties for all of them. Until now.
Every galaxy entry carries a classification label at the record level: SPECTROSCOPIC where T-type comes from HyperLEDA survey data, and PHOTOMETRIC where morphology is derived from WISE infrared color-morphology relations. Honest about what the data is. Always.
GLEN 2.0 — Public Release Alongside STEN 5.0
The Galaxy Engine 2 — Dev Sandbox launches alongside STEN 5.0. GLEN 2.0 is not a prototype — it is a full morphological rendering pipeline for all 22.4 million galaxies in the catalog. Each Hubble type gets a dedicated GLSL shader: logarithmic spiral arms for Sc, tightly wound Sa, strong central bars for SBb and SBc, smooth Sérsic profiles for ellipticals, dust lane suppression for S0. Physical parameters from the catalog directly drive the shader. This is what it looks like to render the real universe at galactic scale.
GLEN renders each galaxy class with a dedicated GLSL pipeline. Not flat images. Not sprites. Real-time WebGL shaders that respond to the galaxy's Hubble type, bar strength, arm pitch angle, and inclination. All computed on your GPU, per frame.
Every galaxy carries redshift, distance, morphology, stellar mass, and SFR where available. The TheGalaxyDB API exposes the full 22.4M-entry dataset for programmatic access — REST-first, JSON everywhere, rate limits that scale with your plan.
TheGalaxyDB and TheStarDB share the same sanctum API backend. Together they form the astronomical database arm of the Preservation Network — the only platform with 16M+ stars and 22M+ galaxies under one publicly queryable roof.
Browse 22.4 million galaxies by morphology, distance, and redshift — or open the GLEN explorer and render any galactic type live in your browser.