TheGalaxyDB splits every plan into two editions.
Choose the one that fits your project and how deep into the catalog you need to go.
GLEN Lite puts a hand picked set of the sky's most recognizable galaxies in front of you right away, fully rendered and quick to load. GLEN Full opens the entire live catalog behind it, every galaxy we've catalogued, open to search. Both run on the exact same renderer. The only thing that changes is how far into the catalog you're allowed to go.
A hand picked set of the galaxies people actually search for: the giants, the spirals, the ones already familiar from a textbook or a planetarium show, each one fully rendered and backed by real measured data. Nothing anonymous, nothing thin.
Everything in Lite, plus open search across the live catalog behind it: millions of real cataloged galaxies, not a curated slice. Built for researchers, educators, and institutions who need the whole sky, not a highlight reel.
Most people start with Lite. Full is for when the curated collection isn't enough.
| You want to… | Lite | Full |
|---|---|---|
| Recognize and explore the sky's most famous galaxies | ✓ | ✓ |
| Run a museum, planetarium, or classroom kiosk | ✓ | ✓ |
| Use the Hubble Sequence lessons and classification guides | ✓ | ✓ |
| Search for a specific, obscure catalog entry by ID | ✕ | ✓ |
| Do research or coursework needing the complete dataset | ✕ | ✓ |
| Build a product or deployment around the full catalog | ✕ | ✓ |
The choice between GLEN Lite and GLEN Full comes down to one thing: how much of the catalog you actually need to search. Both editions share the same renderer and the same shader detail, so a galaxy looks identical no matter which edition renders it. What differs is the size of the catalog sitting behind your search bar, and for a lot of projects, that difference barely matters.
GLEN Lite exists because most visitors are not trying to page through a catalog that runs into the millions. They want to recognize what they're looking at: a familiar spiral, a giant elliptical, one of the handful of morphology types that show up in every astronomy textbook. Lite renders all 8 of GLEN's morphology classes at full quality and keeps the search bar scoped to a list small enough to stay fast on a kiosk touchscreen or a school laptop. It is not a stripped down GLEN. It is the same GLEN, aimed at a catalog size that actually fits the project.
GLEN Full takes the ceiling off. Instead of a curated shortlist, search opens onto the live catalog behind it, real galaxies with measured or derived redshift and morphology, and where the data supports it, stellar mass and velocity dispersion pulled from real astrophysical relations like Tully Fisher and Faber Jackson. Full is for the researcher pulling up one specific catalog entry, the educator building a lesson around an obscure barred spiral nobody's heard of, or an institution that wants visitors to search anything in the dataset instead of a fixed set of highlights.
Start with Lite unless you already know you need more. It is cheaper, quicker to set up, and covers what the overwhelming majority of visitors and students are actually looking for. Move to Full once your project genuinely needs the depth: ongoing research, coursework built around the full dataset, or a product meant to search the entire catalog rather than a curated slice. Switching later is simple. Your account, bookmarks, and Galaxy Diary all carry over.
Sign up for a free account to start. Purchase Lite or Full when you're ready to go deeper.