2d997e41dbb68a652e4a77a0fe053c07573ab44c
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Commits
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2d997e41db |
Draw the stars around wherever the view is, not only around the Sun
The star field draws a budget of the catalogue: everything within 25 pc of the Sun, then the brightest of the rest. That choice was made once, at load, around the Sun, and never again. On the Gaia catalogue it left most of the map empty wherever the view went: - a region 150 pc out drew 49 of the 442 stars within 25 pc of it; - a plotted route ran through stars no one could see or click. Sol to Almach at 8 pc passes 19 stars and drew 6, Sol to Mirfak 11 of 26; - a search for a faint star flew the camera to an empty point. The drawn set now follows the view. The scene chooses it again at the label cadence, once the orbit target has moved more than 5 pc or the pinned stars have changed. The budget goes, in order, to the selected star and the stars of a plotted route, then everything within 25 pc of where the view is centred, then the same around the Sun, then the brightest of the rest. The instance buffers hold the budget and are rewritten in place. Checked in Chromium on WebGPU, framing Mirfak from 12 pc: with the set chosen around the Sun, 122 of the 649 stars within 25 pc were drawn; following the view, all 649. At the opening view the drawn set is the same as before. A refocus takes 9 ms in the browser (5 ms of it choosing). The first version took 16-36 ms in the browser, a visible hitch during a flight. Most of that time went on walking the 423 651-star brightness order once per neighbourhood, out of catalogue order, and on recomputing 70 000 colours. Now both neighbourhoods are gathered in one pass in catalogue order and sorted on their own, and colours and sizes are computed once for the whole catalogue. The brightness order itself sorts a typed copy of the magnitudes, taking 83 ms at load instead of 104-139 ms. STAR_RENDER_BUDGET is now 70 000, and its comment gives the measurements behind it rather than "currently set to the whole catalogue", which stopped being true when Gaia landed. At 1920 x 1080 on a Ryzen 7700X: - on the RTX 4080, the whole catalogue costs the same 6.1 ms a frame as the budget; - on the processor's two-core Radeon, standing in for an entry-level laptop, every 100 000 stars costs about 4 ms: 112 fps at the budget, 44 at the whole catalogue, and the same under WebGL2; - drawn whole, the opening view turns into a grey wash that buries the labels and the host rings. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi |
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dc2ce08694 |
Answer the review: direction settles distance, brightness is one-sided, and a lost id stops the scene
Three findings from the adversarial review of the merge, all reproduced. The distance test was hiding 1 489 stars that sit under an arcsecond from their Gaia entry with a Hipparcos parallax off by half — thirty of them at a false few parsecs from the Sun (HIP 82724 at 3.7 pc, where Gaia has it at 62.8) — and the first audit did not see them because it counted residual doubles through the same 50 % filter. Under three arcseconds the distances are now not consulted: a coincidence of direction that close is never chance at this depth (the quarter-degree shift finds none), and the parallax is the thing to fix. Brightness keeps its say at any separation, and is now one-sided: a folded entry may be five magnitudes fainter (a red dwarf in V against G) but not one brighter, because an entry a magnitude brighter than what is already at that spot is a primary Gaia does not carry — Almach, Alfirk and Ashlesha had all been folded into their companions' entries, 93 in all. The sky grid wraps at 0h. The Gaia query orders by source_id after G, so the row order — and the ids assigned from it — is a function of the archive's content rather than of the server's plan for 20 064 ties; the cache key is a hash of the query. And a bookmark to a star id the catalogue no longer holds — 56 000 Gaia ids change with this — sent the scene through reconcileSelection, enterSystem, its decline, finishTransition and reconcileSelection again until the stack overflowed. The selection is cleared instead, at the one place every path goes through. Regenerated: 423 641 stars, 57 512 HYG identities on Gaia positions, no HYG id or name lost, no star within 20 pc left with an unclaimed Gaia entry under an arcsecond. 403 HYG survivors still have an unclaimed Gaia entry within 60": 13 under an arcsecond, where the brightness guard does not trust HYG's magnitude, and the rest components 3" to 60" from their counterpart. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QL6F9Bgfh8SgAiAAcPB9Hw |
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d9bd913458 |
Draw it flat: an orthographic plan view
A perspective camera leans everything away from the centre of the frame. In a system that means the orbits are ellipses whose shape depends on where they happen to sit on screen, so two planets on the same circular orbit do not look like they are on the same circle. Plan view, in the Display panel, swaps the projection for a parallel one and swings to look down the plane the current scale is read against — the galactic plane out in the field, this system's own orbital plane inside one. Circles are circles again, wherever they are. Both halves are the feature and neither alone is it. The projection is what makes the shape honest; the swing is what makes it worth looking at. Orbiting still works afterwards, so a plan is where the view starts rather than a cage. The engine now holds both cameras and keeps them in step, rather than making one on demand: a camera that exists only while it is being looked through is a camera whose pose is always one swap out of date. The orthographic frustum is derived, never stored — it is the perspective camera's own frustum at the current orbit distance, made parallel — which is why the camera flights work through it untouched. They move the camera; the frame follows. Three things had to be taught that a projection had changed. Sprites. three.js turns an angular size into a world size only when it is compiling against a perspective camera (SpriteNodeMaterial: `camera .isPerspectiveCamera && sizeAttenuation === false`). Under a parallel one that step is silently skipped and every star in the field collapses to a thousandth of a parsec. The same arithmetic is now done in the node graph behind a uniform, so one material serves both cameras without being recompiled — and picking follows it exactly, since a star has to be clickable where it is drawn. Depth. A parallel camera does not back away as its frame grows, so at galactic framing the backdrop shell and half the Milky Way sit behind its own plane. Its depth range is symmetric about it instead, which a linear depth buffer can afford and a perspective one could not. And distance. Half the map was keyed on how far back the camera was pulled — the scale ladder, the crossfade, the label radius, the range readout — which under a parallel projection says nothing at all, because the frustum sets the extent. They all read one honest equivalent now: the distance a perspective camera would need to frame the same thing. Two defects found while verifying, both mine, both from this change: The per-frame work was computed against the camera captured at bootstrap while the renderer drew through the other one, so after a swap every label was projected by a camera nobody was looking through. And the zoom limits were derived from the orbit limits, which are in whichever unit space the view is in. Reading them on the frame the scene swaps parsecs for astronomical units pinned the zoom at the ratio between the two, and leaving a system landed the view three kiloparsecs out. Zoom is a plain multiplier on a frame the distance already sets, so it is bounded by a factor. Verified: build clean, 595/595 unit including a new spec for the projection arithmetic, 13/13 end-to-end including two that flatten a system and check the ladder still knows how far out it is, design detector clean, screenshots of both scales in both projections. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi |
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29fd92d118 |
Widen the star catalogue, and separate what is drawn from what is known
The map held 8750 stars within 50 pc and rendered 371 systems. Both were lower than they needed to be, for different reasons. The star catalogue was capped by its own encoding as much as by the cutoff: one JSON object per star, eight key names repeated each time, 157 bytes a star. At the range HYG actually reaches that is 17 MB to download and parse before the first frame. So the numbers move into two binary column stores — positions in stars.bin, which the GPU is handed verbatim, and id/magnitude/colour/spectral index in stars-meta.bin — and the JSON keeps only the strings, with 2600 distinct spectral classifications collapsed to a dictionary. The layout is defined once, in star-catalog.ts, and the ETL and the app both use it, so the writer and the reader cannot drift. The cutoff then goes to 250 pc: 68388 stars, 7.8x as many for 1.7x the bytes. That is where HYG's measurements stop rather than a round number — 98.6% of its rows are Hipparcos, whose parallaxes are good to about a milliarcsecond, so beyond 250 pc it would be plotting noise. Drawing all of them is a separate question from knowing them, and it is answered separately. The field draws a budget: every star inside 25 pc, because the nearest are faint red dwarfs and Proxima Centauri is magnitude 11, then the brightest of everything beyond. Search, navigation and the planet cross-reference still see the whole catalogue. A real GPU would draw all 68388 without noticing; the budget is for the machines that would not, and it is one constant. Systems were limited by something else entirely. The archive data already shipped named 4735 host stars and only 388 resolved, because the rest lay outside a 50 pc catalogue — and the cross-reference kept only its own result, so redoing it meant re-downloading an archive that is not reachable from here. Host coordinates are now stored with each planet, and the match is re-resolved at build time against whatever catalogue the run produced. Even name matching alone, which needs no coordinates and so works on the records already shipped, rescues 335 planets across 238 systems: 371 renderable systems become 609. Two selection rules were tuned for a 50 pc bubble and no longer fit. Tethers followed the Sun's nearest neighbours, which are a speck at this range, and now follow the brightest; labels were ranked by proximity, which named whatever sat nearest the middle of the screen, and are now ranked by brightness — so the view names Canopus, Achernar and Spica rather than a clump of catalogue designations. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G |
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2e525fb5c3 |
Open the map out to the whole Milky Way
The map stopped at the catalogued 50 pc around the Sun — 0.33% of the Galaxy's width — and looked like a point cloud with a search box. Adds the galactic scale above it and the heads-up display the reference map is built from. The Galaxy is not a third coordinate space. It is the same parsec space four orders of magnitude further out, so the model and the star field crossfade against camera distance instead of switching, and the Sun stays where it really is: 8.18 kpc out, on the Orion Spur, between the Sagittarius and Perseus arms. The depth range scales with that distance — one fixed near/far pair cannot both fly into a star and hold the Galaxy. The structure in shared/astro/galaxy.ts is measured: the directions of the centre and the north galactic pole, which fix the disc's 63 degree tilt against the celestial equator; the Sun's galactocentric distance; and a radius, azimuth and pitch angle per arm. The particles scattered around it are not, and cannot be — dust hides the disc, so no catalogue holds the Galaxy's stars. The view says so, and the model fades out before the camera reaches the 50 pc where the real stars are. The rest is the look: polar grids lying in the galactic plane with drop lines from the Sun's neighbours, a scale ladder, a readout panel, range, reticle and frame brackets. Two things had to give way for it. The deep-sky shell is the sky as seen from here, so it dissolves rather than letting the camera fly through a wall of nebulae, and so does the skybox, which is a photograph taken from inside the thing now being viewed from outside. Labels are picked by screen separation rather than distance alone: the Sun's fifteen nearest neighbours are all inside four parsecs and printed as one unreadable clump. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G |
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3a859360ba |
Add the deep-sky backdrop, the last unbuilt piece of the plan
The design doc scopes deep-sky objects as a galaxy-view backdrop and lists fetchDeepSky.ts, deepsky.json and deepsky.model.ts, but none of it existed — it was the only part of the plan with no implementation behind it. ETL: fetchDeepSky.ts pulls the OpenNGC catalog, classifies each object as a galaxy/nebula/cluster, and keeps the ~460 worth drawing (everything Messier, everything with a common name, and anything brighter than magnitude 9) out of ~12,000 mostly-anonymous rows. build.ts runs it and validates the output. Distances are the hard part: OpenNGC has no distance column, and both fallbacks fail for the best-known objects. M31, M33 and M42 are Local Group members whose redshift is negative or absent, and a galaxy's catalog parallax comes from a cross-matched foreground star — 6 mas for M31 would put a 780 kpc galaxy at 167 pc. So records store a unit direction on the celestial sphere rather than a position (the line of sight is always known precisely, and the objects are drawn on a fixed backdrop shell where true distance is unusable anyway), and distance is optional metadata carrying its own provenance. Parallax is trusted only for galactic objects, redshift only above z=0.003 where expansion outweighs peculiar velocity. 330 of 463 get a distance; the rest honestly report none. Rendering: DeepSkyRenderer paints the objects as soft additive billboards on a 2500 pc shell — clear of the 50 pc star field, beyond the camera's 2000 pc orbit limit, and inside its 5000 pc far plane. Size comes from real angular extent, so Andromeda is six times wider than the full Moon, clamped at both ends. Sprites rather than points because the WebGPU backend caps point primitives at one pixel; materials are shared per kind and brightness band, so 460 objects cost nine of them. The brightest dozen get permanent labels, which needed the label overlay to accept string ids alongside numeric star ids. The backdrop is decorative, so a failure to load its dataset is logged and the star field comes up regardless. Also documents the app in the README, which until now covered only the plugin marketplace. Tests: 112 passing, up from 54. Build, both typechecks and the Playwright suite are green. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G |
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d7e8ea1d4d |
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Add star-map Angular app, ETL pipeline, and caveman plugin Angular 3D star map (galaxy/system/body views, Three.js rendering, navigation store) plus the NASA ETL tooling that builds the star, exoplanet and solar-system datasets, Playwright e2e suite, and the cs:caveman Claude Code plugin (command, agent, skill). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> @ |