Describe the star at a system's centre as it is drawn now, not by the innermost-orbit rule and its halo

The README still said the star was sized against its innermost orbit and made visible by a halo,
two things 7213f98 and 2242fe0 removed. It now says what the view draws: the star at its own
radius on the orbits' scale, the archive's for a host and derived from luminosity and temperature
otherwise, marked "from colour and brightness" on the card; a limb-darkened disc in its
blackbody's colour, lighting its planets in that colour against the Sun's; a grey point where
nothing gives a size or temperature (5aac46d); the three-pixel floor and no halo; the camera held
at 0.05 AU or three radii, whichever is further, and a giant framed inside its neighbours' ring
(d1aa22e).

Measured on :4302 at 1600 by 1000 against published radii: Sun 1.0000 R☉ (card "1.00 solar
radii"); Proxima Centauri 0.1410, the archive's st_rad (0.154 in Boyajian et al. 2012); Sirius A
1.7943, derived, card "~1.8 solar radii, from colour and brightness" (1.711); TRAPPIST-1 0.1192
(0.119). The star's light: Sun (1, 1, 1), Proxima (1, 0.523, 0.165), TRAPPIST-1 (1, 0.443,
0.095), ups And (F8V) (0.899, 0.937, 1), Sirius (0.52, 0.666, 1), intensity pi in every one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-30 13:34:38 +02:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5.5
parent a70a7290f3
commit 89c2568018
+10 -9
View File
@@ -62,15 +62,16 @@ instead of having to be inferred from a shape in space. The camera frames that g
the orbits, from the field of view it actually has, so the outermost ring sits inside the frame
with room around it at any system scale and any window shape.
The star at the centre is sized against the system's *innermost* orbit, so it can never swallow
its closest planet, while the camera is placed to frame the *outermost* ring — and in the solar
system those differ by a factor of a hundred. At the distance that fits Pluto in view, a disc
that stays clear of Mercury is about a pixel across, and no radius satisfies both. So the disc
stays honest to the orbits and the star's halo carries its visibility, floored against the framed
radius: light is not a surface, and a glow reaching past the innermost orbit says the star is
bright rather than that it is large. That floor is bounded from both sides — large enough that
the star reads at a glance, small enough that Venus's and Earth's orbits stay legible as rings
around it. Mercury's, three pixels wide at that range, does not survive either way.
The star at the centre is drawn at its own radius, to the same scale as its orbits: the
archive's measured radius for a planet host, and otherwise one derived from its luminosity and
temperature (Stefan-Boltzmann), which the card marks "from colour and brightness". Its surface
is a limb-darkened disc in the colour of a blackbody at its temperature, and its planets are lit
in that colour, relative to the Sun's, so the solar system's photographs stay as they were
taken. A star nothing gives a size or a temperature for is a grey point. Like every marker, the
disc is never drawn smaller than three pixels, so a red dwarf framed with its outermost orbit
still shows; there is no halo. The camera comes no closer to its centre than 0.05 AU or three of
its radii, whichever is further, and a giant is framed far enough back that its disc stays
inside the ring its neighbours' names are drawn on.
![51 Pegasi b: a surface derived from its measured mass, orbit and host-star luminosity, beside the figures it was derived from](docs/screenshots/body-detail.jpg)