The floor that stopped the Sun disappearing reached past Venus and up to
Earth, covering the two orbits it most needed to leave alone.
Halved, from 3.5% of the framed radius to 2%. The halo's visual radius is
half its extent, so that puts its edge at 1% of the framed radius, and the
orbits it has to clear sit at their own fraction of the same radius: in
the solar system, framed to hold Pluto, Venus is at 1.3% and Earth at
1.8%. Both are now outside it, and the star still reads at about nine
pixels across on a typical window.
Mercury, at 0.7%, is still inside — and would be at any halo large enough
to see, since its orbit is only three pixels wide at that range. That is
now a pinned test rather than an oversight.
The floor was only ever the lower bound; the tests now state the upper one
too, in the terms the trade is actually made in — pixels on screen for
visibility, AU against real orbits for clearance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
Framing the whole system pushed the camera far enough back that the star
at the centre became a speck — about a pixel across for the Sun.
The cause is a constraint that cannot be tuned away. A star is sized
against its system's innermost orbit, because it must never swallow its
closest planet, while the camera is placed to frame the outermost ring.
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 a pixel
across. No radius satisfies both, because the information genuinely does
not fit on one screen at that zoom.
So the disc stays honest to the orbits and the halo carries the
visibility. Light is not a surface: a glow that reaches past the innermost
orbit says the star is bright, not that it is large. Its extent is still a
multiple of the star — so a compact system keeps exactly the corona it had
— but floored against the framed radius, which is what the wide systems
needed.
The disc grows a little too: it may now reach 45% of the innermost orbit
rather than 35%, which still leaves clear space between the star's limb
and the closest orbit.
Also makes createGlowSprite take the extent it will draw rather than a
radius and a multiplier. The two were only ever multiplied together, and
how large a star's halo should be is not a property of the star — it
depends on how its system is framed, which is a decision that belongs with
the framing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
The grid overflowed the frame in 368 of the 371 systems the datasets
contain — median fill 1.11, and the outermost ring cut off by the viewport
edge in almost every one.
Two compounding causes. The framing distance was a fixed multiple of the
outermost orbit, tuned by eye against a 55-degree field of view; the
engine's camera is 50. And it framed the outermost *orbit*, while the
widest thing actually drawn is the grid's outer ring, which by
construction always sits beyond it.
Neither is fixable by adjusting the multiple, because a multiple is the
wrong shape of answer: what has to fit is a radius on screen, and how much
radius a given distance buys depends entirely on the lens. So the distance
now comes from the camera's own vertical field of view and aspect —
picking whichever screen axis is the tighter one, so a portrait window
backs off further rather than clipping — applied to the grid's outer ring
with an explicit margin around it.
The ceiling goes up with it. Eighty AU could not frame the solar system
out to Pluto once the real field of view was accounted for; that needs 120
on a landscape display and 140 on a portrait one. Only companions hundreds
of AU out reach the new ceiling, and those still arrive framed on their
inner region.
Measured across every system in the data, at three window shapes: the
overflow count drops from 368 to 2, the fill settles at exactly 0.89 —
the margin, uniformly — and the outer ring still encloses the outermost
orbit everywhere, so neither invariant was traded for the other.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
A system was a handful of ellipses floating in the dark. You could see
that one orbit was bigger than another, but not how big, and not that a
planet sat above or below the plane the others share.
Adds the same plane-and-tether reading aid the outer scales got: a polar
grid in the system's own reference plane, with a drop line from each body
onto it.
Ring radii snap to a 1-2-5 ladder rather than dividing the system evenly,
because the point is to put a number on a distance — 5, 10, 15 AU can be
read at a glance and 4.34, 8.68, 13.02 cannot. That holds across the four
orders of magnitude real systems span: the solar system gets 5 AU rings,
TRAPPIST-1 gets 0.01 AU ones. The outermost ring encloses the outermost
orbit rather than falling just inside it.
The rings are dashed. Solid ones would sit in the same plane as the orbit
ellipses, which are themselves rings, and at a glance a reference circle
and a circular orbit are the same picture. Dashes are cut by dropping
whole segments rather than by a dashed material: the ring is already built
from independent segment pairs, so a material's dash pattern would restart
at every one.
Drawing the grid exposed a framing bug it made unmissable. The camera
settled along one fixed direction derived from the ecliptic, which is
face-on only for the one system whose elements are ecliptic. Every
exoplanet system — measured against the plane of the sky, perpendicular to
the line of sight to its own host star — was being presented nearly
edge-on, a smear of overlapping ellipses. The settle direction is now
taken relative to whichever plane the system was measured in, so all of
them read as discs. The solar system is unmoved, which a test pins.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
Star size, planet marker size and camera distance were all fixed constants in
AU, tuned against the solar system's 30 AU span. Real systems span four orders
of magnitude, and the fixed values served only the wide end. Measured across the
370 systems that draw planets:
- 170 had their innermost orbit inside the 0.2 AU star sphere, and for 107 of
those every orbit was inside it, so the system rendered as a lone sphere.
- 193 were framed from the 3 AU distance floor — for TRAPPIST-1 that is 48x
the width of the entire system, reducing it to a cluster of specks.
- Planet markers were effectively a flat 0.09 AU, since almost every body
clamps to the maximum. Inside Gl 357's 0.204 AU system that is wider than
the orbits themselves: one planet swallowed the whole view.
All three are now derived from the system's own measurements. The star is a
fraction of the innermost orbit, so it can never reach the closest one. The
camera is a multiple of the outermost orbit, so everything fits. Markers scale
with the span against the solar system as the reference, so the constants that
were tuned by eye keep their meaning. Because star, markers and camera all
scale together, a compact system now looks like a wide one — same apparent star,
same legible spread of orbits.
Gl 357 is the case that motivated this. It gained three planets in the previous
commit and still rendered as a bare star, because all three orbits were inside
the star sphere. It now shows its star and all three orbits.
The renderer measures the span before building anything, since markers are sized
against it as they are created, which also removes the reduce over tracked
bodies that used to compute it afterwards. The star sphere is rebuilt per system
rather than shared, so its geometry is now disposed on each transition.
Sol is deliberately unchanged: its innermost orbit is Mercury at 0.387 AU, so
the star lands just under the old fixed radius, and the reference span makes the
marker scale factor 1. Verified side by side.
Tests: 206 passing, up from 199. Verified in a real browser against both ends of
the range — Gl 357 at 0.2 AU and Sol at 30 AU.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
Claude