Your first ten minutes

Nothing here needs an account until step 3.

#1. Look at the map

Open exointel.watch. The globe loads with a default set of layers already on and the feeds already refreshing.

Drag to turn it. Scroll to zoom. Click any marker to inspect it — an aircraft shows its flight, a camera opens its picture, a quake shows its magnitude and depth.

Open /view (bottom left) and switch layers on and off. Turn most of them off and put two or three back on: the map is far more useful as an answer to a question ("what is flying over the Baltic right now") than as a display of everything at once. Your selection is remembered for next time.

#2. Ask the console

The bar along the bottom of the screen is the command console.

Type a place name or a pair of coordinates and the map flies there. Type 48.9, 24.7 or Odesa and see.

Now press the ✦ AI button beside it and ask something in plain words — "what's on fire in Greece", "show me the ships near Gibraltar". It reads the live feeds, answers, and opens the app that holds the detail. Asking the AI needs an account; flying to a place does not.

#3. Run your first lookup

Open the apps grid (the grid icon in the console) and pick Lookups.

Every tool in it shows a padlock until you have an account, and each one names the plan that opens it. For DNS, WHOIS and the rest of the core lookups that plan is Free, so sign in from /account (top right): email and a password of at least ten characters. The account is active immediately — no verification email, no approval queue, no card.

In Lookups, choose the DNS tool, type google.com, and run it.

You get the domain's real DNS records: which nameservers answer for it, where its mail is routed, what it publishes about itself in TXT records.

Now switch to WHOIS with the same domain — who registered it and when. Then Certs — every TLS certificate publicly issued for that name, which is also the cheapest way to discover subdomains somebody forgot about.

That is the whole loop: pick the question, type the thing, read the answer. Each run costs one lookup from your monthly allowance, and every result is saved to your history.

#4. See it collected

Open the Profile app and type the same domain.

Everything the three lookups produced is there as one subject: the findings, the links between them, the timeline of when each was seen and how often it has been corroborated. That is the point of running lookups inside a product rather than in a terminal — the second question inherits the first one's answer.

Hit Open printable report for a version you can hand to someone.

#5. Learn the shortcuts

Press ? anywhere to open the field manual. The ones worth knowing on day one:

#Where to go from here

• The live map in full — every layer and its source
• The Lookups toolkit — all eight tools and what each will not tell you
• The AI assistant — the console AI, per-app AI, and the lookup planner
• Plans, limits and billing — what the allowances are and when they reset