Does buying an asteroid on AstraPixels name it officially?

No. A name you choose is shown on astrapixels.com only. It is not an IAU designation, it is not submitted to the International Astronomical Union, and no observatory or catalogue will recognise it. Official minor-planet names are assigned by the IAU and cannot be bought from anybody.

What does permanent mean, exactly?

A one-time claim has no renewal and no expiry date. There is one exception: if the link on your claim fails 3 consecutive monthly checks the claim is marked derelict, and if it is still derelict 90 days later the body returns to inventory. Fixing the link at any point before that clears the state.

What happens to a derelict claim on the map?

It stays visible with a decayed sprite rather than disappearing. A visibly abandoned rock is more honest than a blank space, and it tells other buyers that the inventory is about to come back.

Do you promise traffic or search rankings?

No. We publish measured impression counts for the rented tooltip and modal surfaces, and you can check the arithmetic on your own report page, linked from your receipt. We make no forecast about future traffic, clicks, or any SEO effect of a link.

Yes, within 14 days of purchase, for any reason, as long as the claim has not been approved and gone live. Once a claim is live it occupies inventory that was withdrawn from sale, so refunds after that are case-by-case.

Terms and content policy

Short, and written to be read before you buy rather than after. Two sections matter more than the rest: what a name is and is not, and the one exception to permanence.

Naming is not an IAU designation

A name you choose here is shown on AstraPixels only. It is not an IAU designation, it is not submitted to the International Astronomical Union or to any other body, and no observatory, catalogue or star chart will recognise it. Official minor-planet names are assigned by the IAU and cannot be bought.

We are aware this is the exact claim the star-registry industry leaves vague, and being unambiguous about it is deliberate. What you get is a label attached to a body on this map, shown in its tooltip, on its object page and on its share card. That is a real thing and it is worth what it costs. It is not an entry in any astronomical catalogue.

The same wording appears at the point of purchase and next to every custom name on the site. If you ever find a place on astrapixels.com where a custom name appears without it, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.

Permanence and the link-rot policy

A one-time claim is permanent. There is no renewal, no subscription and no expiry date. It has exactly one exception, and here it is in full.

Monthly link check: Once a month we request the URL on your claim. A response that is not an error counts as a pass, and a pass resets the counter to zero.
3 consecutive failures: The claim is marked derelict. It keeps its slot, keeps your name on it, and renders with a decayed sprite. You get an email at each failure, so you have roughly a quarter of warning.
90 days derelict: The body returns to inventory and can be claimed by somebody else. Your claim is recycled, not deleted, so the history stays intact.
Getting out of it: Fix the link, or change it to a working one, at any point before the recycle. One passing check clears the derelict state and the counter.

Why the exception exists: a map full of links to sites that no longer exist is a dead map, and dead links are the one thing that would make the inventory worthless for everybody who is still around. The policy applies to the link, never to the payment: we do not recycle a working claim to resell it.

Annual-lease tiers (8 planet sponsorships, the comets, the nearby stars and the Sun) are different by design and say so on their own pages: they renew yearly and lapse if a renewal is not paid. A declined card does not blank a lease immediately, because Stripe retries for days and blanking the most expensive inventory over one failed charge would be the worst possible handling of it.

What you are buying

Two separate things, priced separately, and it is worth knowing which one you are looking at.

A body (one-time): An asteroid at $5 up to a dwarf planet at $99. Bought once, owned indefinitely. Your brand, tagline, link and optional custom name are shown on that body.
An orbital slot (one-time): $29 for one of 90 permanent positions orbiting a planet. Slot count scales with the planet's real radius, so bigger planets carry more.
A lease (annual): The genuinely scarce positions: the Sun, the eight planet sponsorships, the comets and the nearby stars. Leased rather than sold, because selling one of eight planets once would underprice it forever.
A rented surface (monthly): Space in a tooltip or a modal. Recurring, and repriced monthly against measured impressions.
A checkout reservation: Starting a purchase holds the slot for 30 minutes so two buyers cannot pay for the same position. An abandoned checkout releases it automatically.

Content policy

Nothing you submit appears on the map until a person has read it. Approval is manual, and it is the only thing standing between a five-dollar price point and a map full of scams.

Rejected outright, with a refund:

malware, phishing, or anything that misrepresents who it belongs to
sexual content, and anything involving minors in any way
hate speech, harassment, or content targeting a private individual
weapons, illegal drugs and controlled substances
tokens, coins, presales, trading signals and get-rich schemes
impersonation of a real person, company, agency or space mission
anything implying an endorsement by NASA, ESA, JPL, the IAU or any real institution
cloaking: a link that shows a moderator one destination and a visitor another

Links are nofollow by default. A dofollow link is a priced upgrade, and buying it does not change the rest of this policy or exempt the link from the monthly check.

We can remove a live claim that later breaks these rules, for example a domain that changes hands. If we remove yours for that reason we refund the purchase pro rata for a lease, and in full for a one-time claim within the first year.

Advertising never displaces content. A tooltip’s first line is always the body’s real name and a real sourced fact; a sponsor line sits beneath it, dimmer, and marked Sponsored. There are no tooltip ads at full-system zoom at all, because hovers at that scale are accidental cursor sweeps and billing for them would be fraud.

Rented surfaces and billing

Tooltip sponsor (from $9/month): One dim line beneath the object's real fact. Desktop hover only, and we report the device split. Internal key: tooltip.
Modal header (from $19/month): A 'presented by' strip at the top of this object's detail modal. Internal key: modal_header.
Network native card (from $6/month): A rotating card inside every object's modal, network-wide. Priced by share of voice. Internal key: modal_native.

After the first 30 days a tooltip’s monthly rate becomes its base rate plus a fixed amount per thousand trailing-30-day hovers, recomputed monthly. You can check that arithmetic against the impression counts on your own report page, which is the point of pricing it that way.

An impression requires sustained visibility, not a mouse passing over a sprite, and each session is capped per placement per day. We aggregate into daily totals and never store a raw event stream, so there is no per-visitor tracking data to lose.

What we do not promise

No traffic forecast. We report what happened. We do not estimate what will happen, and any number you see on this site is measured rather than projected.
No SEO claim. A link here is a link. We make no claim about its effect on your rankings, and we would not believe anybody who did.
No rights over the real body.Nobody can sell you those, us included. Under the Outer Space Treaty no celestial body is anybody’s property.
No guarantee the site runs forever. If astrapixels.com shuts down we will say so publicly with as much notice as we can, and we will publish the catalog and the claim list so the record survives us.

Who you are paying, and what shows on your statement

astrapixels.com is run by the same people as nicklaunches.com, and payments for both go through one Stripe account. Saying so here, rather than leaving you to work it out from a card statement, is the whole point of this section.

Card details never reach this site.Checkout happens on Stripe's own pages. What comes back to us is an identifier for the payment, the amount, and the email address you used. We never see or store a card number.

Because the Stripe account is shared, the name on your statement may be the operating business rather than astrapixels.com.

Either way, email us before opening a dispute if a charge looks unfamiliar. A chargeback revokes the claim and frees its position automatically, which is a slower and worse outcome for you than a refund we can issue in a minute.

A purchase here creates no relationship with anything you bought on nicklaunches.com, and the reverse. The two sites keep separate records: sharing a payment processor is a billing arrangement, not a merged account.

Refunds and changes

Do you promise traffic or search rankings?: No. We publish measured impression counts for the rented tooltip and modal surfaces, and you can check the arithmetic on your own report page, linked from your receipt. We make no forecast about future traffic, clicks, or any SEO effect of a link.
Can I get a refund?: Yes, within 14 days of purchase, for any reason, as long as the claim has not been approved and gone live. Once a claim is live it occupies inventory that was withdrawn from sale, so refunds after that are case-by-case.

If we change these terms we will change this page, and any change that affects an existing claim will be announced before it applies. A change cannot retroactively shorten the permanence of a claim you already hold.

Questions, corrections and moderation appeals: reply to the email your receipt came from. If you have not bought anything yet, the same address is on the map.