Global Heartbeat

Live demo: https://global-heartbeat.vercel.app

A fun interactive globe. Cities pulse at a heart rate driven by how busy their skies are, with live layers for earthquakes, the aurora, the ISS and the night sky. Tap a city to open its weather, air quality, bike-share stations, live aircraft and rain radar.

No build step. Plain ES modules, three.js from a CDN.

Run it locally

node server.mjs

Then open http://localhost:3000. Needs Node 18 or newer. The small server does two jobs the browser can't: it proxies live aircraft (adsb.lol), bike-share feeds and satellite orbit data, which browsers can't fetch directly, and caches them.

Deploy

The same routes exist as Vercel functions in api/, wired up by vercel.json. Import the repo on Vercel, leave all settings alone and deploy. Responses are cached at the CDN, so many visitors share one upstream call.

Files

• main.js the globe: cities, day/night, aurora, quakes, ISS, panel, sound
• sky.js stars, constellations, Sun, Moon, planets, pulsars (loaded separately so the globe works without it)
• sats.js satellites, ship.js the starfighter toy, tonight.js the "Tonight in..." sky card
• city.js the zoomed city view: map tiles, bikes, aircraft, radar
• feeds.js server-side fetching shared by server.mjs and api/*
• bikes.js the bike-share feed per city, cities.js the city list, weather.js weather and air quality, sound.js the heartbeat

Data and credits

• Aircraft: adsb.lol, community ADS-B data
• Bike share: public GBFS feeds (Citi Bike, Divvy, Bike Share Toronto, Metro, Ecobici, Bicimad, Velib, nextbike, docomo and others) and Transport for London
• Weather and air quality: Open-Meteo (CC BY 4.0, non-commercial use)
• Earthquakes: USGS. Aurora: NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center. ISS position: wheretheiss.at
• Rain radar: RainViewer. Map tiles: Esri. Land outlines and stars: Natural Earth and d3-celestial
• Satellite orbits: CelesTrak, propagated in the browser with satellite.js. A snapshot lives in data/ as a fallback
• Planet, Sun and Moon positions: astronomy-engine
• 3D: three.js

Pulsar positions and spin periods are well-known catalog values. Each is shown slowed down so nothing flashes fast.