Commit Graph
88 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 321540ed91 Merge the solar-system branch, so the star catalogue lands on the sky it now shares
Both branches changed the system view's star, the body card's provenance line, the exoplanet
fetch and the ETL's validators. Resolved by keeping both sides:

- The system view's star is the catalogue's (its own radius and temperature, a limb-darkened
  surface in its colour) and turns like a planet when it is the Sun (the solar branch's IAU pole
  and 25.38-day turn), keyed on SUN_STAR_ID, since the catalogue branch dropped the scene's own
  SOL_STAR_ID. Framing takes the outermost thing drawn (an eccentric orbit's aphelion, from the
  solar branch) and the star's radius for a giant (from the catalogue). The solar branch's comment
  about a halo is dropped: there has been none since #33.
- The card's no-temperature sentence is the catalogue's (the host's luminosity or the orbit's size,
  not "not in the catalogue", which holds for 27 planets) and ends with the solar branch's reason
  why no image is used (a point of light for the 101 imaged planets, none for the rest).
- fetchExoplanets reads the composite table and the distance errors (catalogue) and the imaged
  list (solar); build.ts runs both branches' validators.

The data were regenerated by the full ETL on the merged code, from cache (nothing refetched):
stars.bin, stars-meta.bin, stars-index.json and deepsky.json come out byte for byte the catalogue
branch's, bodies.json the solar branch's, and exoplanets.json the catalogue branch's but for the
imaged flag on 101 planets, WASP-108 b not among them. Unit suite 977 passed, the two branches'
870 and 837 over their shared 730, so no test was lost.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 22:07:34 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 4c1e19d635 Give the disc sizes the framing quotes as radii, and the meta columns in the order they are stored
The framing rule works in radii: at 390x844 a giant's disc may take 0.74 - 90/195 = 0.278 of the
195 px half-side, 54 px from the centre, and before e62e2fb it took half of it, 98 px. The comment
and the spec called the 98 px a disc, which reads as a width, and a name 70 px from the centre
would then have been off it. e62e2fb's message says "54 px wide" and "98 px wide" for the same
radii: the discs are about 108 and 195 px across.

The stars-meta.bin doc comment still put the photometry byte before the distance error, which
f31ffe1 moved ahead of it for alignment; metaColumns, the DISTANCE_ERROR_STEPS comment and the
README already had the new order.

The scene's 2 883 hosts past the survey edge are all hosts past it: 2 878 are the archive's own
stars and 5 are HYG's (HD 81817, HD 102272, HD 158996, HD 208527, HD 220074).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 19:17:20 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 073fb9f718 Ring only the planet hosts inside the survey edge, so the Kepler field is not a band over the view
4c8e4a0 added 3 277 hosts from the archive, 2 883 of them past 250 pc and 916 past a kiloparsec,
most in the Kepler field. Every host got a 12 px ring whatever its distance and a place in the
draw budget's first tier after the pinned stars, rules set when 1 of 1 379 hosts lay past 250 pc.
At boot the opening view held 3 332 rings against 1 290 before, 1 687 of them in its lower right
(x > 1000, y > 550 at 1600x1000) where there were 116, over the 250-350 pc grid labels; hosts 1-3
kpc away read as neighbours in a view whose range is 307 pc, and 629 stars past a kiloparsec were
drawn where there had been 3.

Rings and the host tier now take the hosts within SURVEY_EDGE_PC only. The far hosts still compete
for the budget by brightness, and search still enters them. Measured in the running app at
1600x1000: 1 853 rings in all, 1 698 in the opening view, 199 in its lower right; 31 stars past a
kiloparsec drawn; 1 767 hosts drawn. This reverses "a ring on every host" for the far ones: that
was the user's rule of 2026-09-17, when the only far host was one star, so it is flagged for them.

The scene test's fixture gains the lens's planet, 6.7 kpc out. The new test checks the ring count
and the host tier; the opening-view test now expects the lens out of that tier. Control: dropping
the distance condition fails the new test and that one (2 of 824).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 16:14:28 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 e62e2fb03f Keep a giant's disc clear of its neighbours' names on a phone, not only on a desktop
d1aa22e framed a giant so its disc took half the view's tighter half-extent, inside the ring its
neighbours are named on at 0.74 of it. It measured that at 1600x1000 only. The names hang a fixed
distance in from the ring, 74-78 px, so on a 390x844 phone the 0.24 of the half-side between disc
and ring is 47 px and the names land on the disc: Betelgeuse was drawn 98 px wide with HD 39374's
name 70 px from its centre, Antares with HD 148199's at 68 px.

The framing now takes the canvas's shorter side and keeps the disc inside the ring less 90 px,
at most half the half-extent as before, at least a tenth. Measured in the running app at 390x844
on arrival: Betelgeuse, Antares and Rigel drawn 54 px wide, the nearest names at 70, 68 and 127
px. At 1600x1000 nothing changes: Betelgeuse 250 px, its nearest name at 296. The ring's fraction
moves to system-framing.ts, beside the rule that depends on it, and the scene reads it there.

The review's other half, that the Readout sheet covers 44 % of the disc once opened on a phone, is
not changed: the dock opens with no panel below 640 px and folds it on any tap on the scene, so
the star arrives with nothing over it.

Control: giving the names no reach fails "keeps a giant's disc clear of its neighbours' names on
a phone" alone. The scene's passing of the canvas size has no unit test (the test canvas has no
size); the app measurement above covers it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 16:09:56 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 17cf11b6b1 Tint a planet host in the star field at the archive's temperature, which its disc is drawn at
95ffb00 said the field took "the same function and the same temperature the disc is drawn with".
It did for stars without planets, but a host's disc is drawn at the archive's st_teff
(starSurfaceOf), and the field read the host's temperature off its colour. Of the 4 485 hosts with
a temperature on the published catalogue, 1 755 were more than 0.1 in RGB from their own disc:
Kepler-186 at 3 096 K in the field and 3 788 K on its disc, HD 97048 at 6 825 and 10 000.

The scene now hands StarFieldRenderer each host's first published temperature among its planets,
the rule starSurfaceOf uses (publishedTemperaturesK, beside it), and the field tints that star at
it. Over the catalogue the hosts more than 0.1 off their disc go from 1 755 to 0. Measured in the
running app at 1600x1000, field tint against the disc's starTint after entering each: Kepler-186
(1, 0.620, 0.326) against (1, 0.619, 0.326), where the field was (1, 0.498, 0.174); Teegarden's
Star 0.001 apart; Proxima, HD 97048 and Sirius 0.

The field's test compared colorIndexToRgb with the same formula. The new scene test enters Proxima,
whose B-V 1.8 reads 3 070 K and whose disc is drawn at the archive's 2 900, and compares its field
colour with the disc's. Controls, each failing that test alone: the field ignoring the map it is
given, and the scene passing an empty one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 15:48:09 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 3e1bd33b6c Draw every body in a system on one shared sphere, so returning to the Sun's system is no long task
Each marker built its own 64 by 32 SphereGeometry, and the Sun's system now has 38 of them: the
renderer's constructor took 15 ms, 12 of them building spheres, and with their first upload a
return to the system made a long task of 52 to 70 ms that the base's 18 bodies never did.

Every marker is now the one unit sphere, scaled to its radius, which it keeps in
userData.radiusAu. The shared sphere is never disposed; Saturn's ring is built in the sphere's
own units, since it is the marker's child; keepMarkersLegible reads the stored radius and scales
against the sphere's.

Measured on :4301, eight returns to the Sun's system each (select null, then 0, at 1600x1000):
before, a long task on 3 of 8 (52-57 ms), swapToSystemSpace 13-17 ms and the first render 30-40;
after, no long task on 8 of 8, the swap 2.7-4.4 ms and the first render 20-38. Earth is drawn at
the same 0.656 AU at arrival, and every member shares one geometry.

Tests: one sphere for every marker, each at bodyMarkerRadiusAu of its radius, and not disposed
with its system; Earth held to its 3-pixel floor at the arrival framing, which no test covered.
Guarded mutants, each failing only its named test: a sphere per marker, the shared sphere
disposed, the ring built in AU inside the scaled marker ('picks Saturn through its rings'), and
the legibility scale divided by the body's radius.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 15:14:02 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 18faa6d0b2 Classify a star for the rows that list it, not every star each time the index is built
The search index and the route index gave every one of the 455 571 stars a subtitle up front
through spectralClassification, which filtered the dwarf table afresh on each call; the star
field's tints read the same table once per BP−RP star. Both indices now carry the star itself
and classify it only for the rows shown (entrySubtitle): eight search results, a few route
options. The two filtered columns of the table are built once.

Node, over the shipped catalogue, five runs: classifying every star 121-167 ms before, 56-62
after hoisting the table alone; reading the sequence at every BP−RP colour 187-216 ms, now
111-127. In the app on :4302, two cold loads each, the long task when the Search tab opens was
264-380 ms (median 280) before and 164-276 ms (median 171) after; the longest boot task 863 and
875 ms before, 654 and 741 after.

Tests: the search spec checks its index holds no classification and the row still reads
"Star · ~M8"; the scene spec now reads the route options, and checks its index holds none either.
Controls: classifying every star in the search index, doing so in the route index, and route
options printing the index's subtitle each fail the named test.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 23:30:53 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 936d1c01f8 Leave a system outwards from wherever the camera stands, and test that the scene frames the furthest it draws
Leaving a system flew the camera to a fixed 400 AU. Since c45d916 frames the Sun's system on Eris's
97.7 AU aphelion, a phone held upright arrives 508 AU out, so leaving drew the system 21 per cent
nearer during the 0.9 s exit (review, 390x844: 507.9 -> 400.0 AU). The exit now flies to 400 AU or
half as far again as the camera already stands, whichever is further. Measured live on :4301, the
distance from the Sun through the exit, first and last frame:

  390x844    507.9 -> 761.8 AU   (was 507.9 -> 400.0)
  360x780    508.5 -> 762.7
  768x1024   312.9 -> 469.3      (was 312.9 -> 400)
  1600x1000  234.7 -> 400.0      (unchanged)

and never nearer in between. The swap puts the camera at GALAXY_APPROACH_DISTANCE_PC whatever the
exit distance, so only the animation changes.

No test checked that the scene hands outermostRadiusAu to the framing: framing on the 67.9 AU
semi-major axis instead, which on a square window puts Eris off screen on arrival, passed all 841
tests. The scene spec's fixture held Earth alone. A describe now adds Eris (a = 67.934, e = 0.4382):
- "frames the furthest the system draws" requires the settled camera to stand at
  systemFramingDistanceAu(outermostRadiusAu) from its target, 234.7 AU at aspect 1.
- "leaves the system outwards even from a phone's framing" enters at aspect 390/844, then samples the
  camera each frame of the exit until the swap: never nearer, and further at the end.

Controls, each run on the full suite:
- outermostRadiusAu -> maxTopLevelSemiMajorAxisAu in the scene fails both (2 failed, 842 passed);
  the second fails too because the arrival is then under 500 AU.
- Math.max -> Math.min in the exit (back to 400 AU) fails the exit test only (1 failed, 843 passed).

The framing spec's fit() said it was "what the scene actually composes"; it frames the ring only, so
its comment now says it is the grid's half and where the aphelion is tested.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 23:17:00 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 c45d9160e3 Frame the Sun's system on Eris's aphelion, the furthest it draws, not on the grid ring inside it
The scene framed the grid's outer ring, sized from the largest semi-major axis, and two comments
said the ring was "always the wider of the two, by construction". That held until Eris came in:
its a = 67.93 AU gives an 80 AU ring, but with e = 0.438 its orbit reaches 97.7 AU, and Eris is
95.5 AU out now. The 12 per cent margin protected the ring, not Eris. The review measured Eris's
orbit at 0.982 of the half-width on a 390x844 phone (3.5 px from the edge), 0.987 on 1000x1400,
and on a 1000x1000 window Eris's marker at NDC 1.002, off screen on arrival.

SystemOrbitsRenderer.gridOuterRadiusAu becomes outermostRadiusAu: the ring, or the largest
top-level aphelion a(1 + e) where that runs past it. The scene frames that. Some orbit runs past
its ring in 303 of the 1 190 exoplanet systems too (counted on exoplanets.json), and they are
framed the same way. The 500 AU ceiling rises to 600: the aphelion needs 508 AU on a 390x844 phone,
and 600 holds it with its whole margin down to an aspect of 0.39. The comments are corrected.

Measured in the app on :4301 after entering the Sun, Eris's drawn orbit, largest |NDC x| over its
129 vertices (review's figures before):
  390x844    camera 507.9 AU  0.804  (0.982)
  1000x1400  camera 328.5 AU  0.805  (0.987)
  1000x1000  camera 234.7 AU  0.812  (1.004, marker off screen)
  950x1000   camera 247.0 AU  0.810
  1600x1000  camera 234.7 AU  0.508  (0.627)
No orbit vertex of Neptune, Pluto, Eris, Haumea or Makemake is off screen at any of them. The
cost: inner bodies arrive smaller, the landscape camera 235 AU out instead of 192.

Tests: renderer 'reaches as far as an eccentric orbit goes past the grid: Eris's aphelion, 97.7
AU, not the 80 AU ring' (and the ring where every orbit stays inside it), and framing 'leaves
Eris's aphelion its whole margin in every window shape'. Controls, each failing its named test
only (1 failed, 839 passed): framing on the ring alone; the ceiling back at 500 AU.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 21:24:23 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 3453cd5d9f Say which cards give how far their orbit strays, since Pluto's does not
The date field's description read "Each moon's and dwarf planet's card says how far its orbit
strays from 1950 to 2100." Pluto is a dwarf planet on its card, but it moves on Standish's planet
elements, and the ETL measures only moons and the SBDB bodies against Horizons: its card ends
"Orbit: JPL approximate mean elements (Standish), fit for 3000 BC to AD 3000." and gives no stray
figure. In bodies.json, Ceres (7.2), Eris (0.1), Haumea (0.4), Makemake (0.3) and every moon carry
one; Pluto does not.

The description now reads "AD 1 to AD 3000, where the planets' and Pluto's elements hold. Each
moon's card, and Ceres's, Eris's, Haumea's and Makemake's, says how far its orbit strays from 1950
to 2100." The CLOCK_WINDOW comment and the scene's note comment make the same distinction.

Test: hud-dock 'opens the date field on the clock's date...' asserts the new sentence. Control:
putting the old sentence back fails that test only (1 failed, 836 passed).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 21:18:13 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 f8af0ecf6e List stars in search and routes by the type their colour gives them, and say where archive positions come from
5333be6 gave the star card an estimated type for the 383 695 stars the ETL files as "Unknown",
but search rows, the route search index and the current-star route option still printed that
literal: TRAPPIST-1 read "STAR · UNKNOWN" in search beside "Spectral type ~M8, from colour" on its
card, audit #17's own symptom. spectralClassification (spectral.ts) now gives the catalogue's type,
else the colour's marked "~", else nothing, and all three and the card's subtitle use it; a search
row with nothing to add prints its kind alone rather than a trailing " · ".

The neighbourhood note still read "Positions from measured parallaxes" after 4c8e4a0 placed 3 277
stars at the Exoplanet Archive's sy_dist, 343 of them without a usable parallax and 281 of those
past 1 kpc — microlensing hosts such as OGLE-2005-BLG-390L at 6.6 kpc, from a lensing model.
positionsNote now says so, with the count. Neither the note nor the census subtitle (audit #16) had
a test: putting back "Hipparcos · Yale Bright Star · Gliese" passed all 775.

In the app on :4302: the note reads "Positions from measured parallaxes, and for the 3,277 planet
hosts only the NASA Exoplanet Archive places, from its distances. Grid marks the galactic plane
through the Sun."; search reads "TRAPPIST-1 STAR · ~M8", "OGLE-2005-BLG-390L STAR", "Sirius STAR ·
A0M"; TRAPPIST-1's route option has subtitle "~M8".

The scene spec gains an archive-placed fixture star. Controls, each failing its named test: the
search row printing the raw type, keeping the separator with nothing after it, the route index
and the current-star option printing the raw type, the note back to parallaxes only, the subtitle
back to the old catalogue list (1 of 797 each), the note never counting the archive (2 of 797),
and the classification without its estimate (3 of 797).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 20:42:03 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 5aac46de08 Draw a star nothing gives a size or temperature for as a grey point, not as the Sun
The system view drew every star without a radius at the Sun's radius, and every star without a
temperature in the Sun's colour. PSR J1719-1438, a neutron star 10 km across, came out 1 R☉ wide,
wider than its planet's 0.0044 AU orbit, and b spent nine tenths of its orbit inside it; Procyon B,
a white dwarf of 0.012 R☉ with a type the parser does not read and no colour, was a Sun 81 times
too wide in the Sun's colour.

Such a star is now drawn at 150 km, under the three-pixel floor from anywhere the camera can go, so
the floor's point is what shows, and its disc keeps the photograph's own grey instead of the Sun's
tint. Its light stays white, which is the photographs' own light rather than a claim about the
star. 2 858 stars take this after the clamping in the previous commit, against 3 077 drawn at the
Sun's radius before it.

In the app on :4302: PSR J1719-1438's star is drawn at 1.7×10⁻⁴ AU (the floor, 168 times its
geometry) with b 0.00417 AU from its centre, outside it; Gl 280B at the floor, tint (1, 1, 1) and no
radius on its card; Proxima at 0.141 R☉, tint (1, 0.459, 0.135), light (1, 0.523, 0.165), card
"Luminosity 0.002 L☉" unmarked and "Radius 0.141 solar radii".

The scene's use of the star's surface had no test: every star in the scene spec was drawn at the
Sun's radius, and drawing all of them so, lighting planets white, tinting every disc as the Sun or
closing the camera to the Sun's clearance all passed. The spec now gives Proxima its planet's
archive row and adds Antares and Procyon B, and three tests enter them. Controls, each failing its
named test: every star at the Sun's radius (3 of 787 failed), an unmeasured one at it, the light
without the temperature, the closest approach for the Sun, the Sun's tint for a host, the Sun's tint
for a star without a temperature, and the card without the surface (1 of 787 each). Dropping the
star from the framing distance was not caught: its term, 2.4 radii, never exceeds the three-radius
closest approach the camera is clamped to, so it cannot change where the camera settles.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 20:13:22 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 a281f22f34 Measure every moon and dwarf planet against Horizons from 1950 to 2100, and say on its card how far it strays
The clock reaches AD 1 to AD 3000, but only the planets' cards named a span their elements hold
over; the 25 moons and the four SBDB dwarf planets gave a source and an epoch, though
BodyRecord.orbitSource is documented as "the span they hold over". And the worst offsets the ETL
stated came from twelve New Year's Days: Nereid's year is 360 days, so all twelve fell far from
its periapsis, where a mean ellipse is furthest out. The one date the ETL checked, 2025-01-01, saw
Nereid at 2.6 degrees; it reaches 11.19.

For each moon and each SBDB dwarf planet the ETL now fetches Horizons' ICRF vectors from 1950 to
2100, every other day (daily for Nereid, at an eccentricity of 0.75, and Hyperion, whose row's
eccentricity is a quarter of its real one: every other day gave it 22.14, daily 22.23), and
measures how far the mean elements stray, at the same TDB dates. The card appends it: "JPL SBDB
osculating elements, epoch 2026 Jun 9, within 7.2 degrees of Horizons from 1950 to 2100". Worst
offsets on the real catalogue: the Moon 2.62 (2010 March 27), Phoebe 2.58 (1969, where a comment
claimed "within 2.0"), Phobos 1.26, Mimas 7.43, Iapetus 10.34, Nereid 11.19 (2039 Nov 1),
Hyperion 22.23 (2055 Feb 26), Ceres 7.12 (1953); Io 0.07, Titan 0.06, Eris 0.06.

build.ts recomputes each from the same Horizons positions and fails if an orbit other than
Standish's names no span, if a card states less than it strays, or if a body passes its ceiling:
3 degrees, and Hyperion 23, Nereid 12, Iapetus 11, Mimas 8 and Ceres 8, each explained. The
2025-01-01 check stays for reading errors, its comment no longer passing one date's offsets off as
worst ones. The Sun's note says the moons' and those four's elements were checked from 1950 to
2100, and the date field's description that each card says how far its orbit strays over that span.
In the running app Ceres's, Phobos's and Nereid's cards end "within 7.2", "1.3" and "11.2 degrees
of Horizons from 1950 to 2100".

The CLOCK_WINDOW comment also had the calendars the wrong way at AD 1: proleptic Gregorian dates
are two days behind the Julian calendar there, level from AD 200 to 300, and ten days ahead by
1582. It now says so, and names Ceres's drift where it named Phobos's, which its orbit now carries.

Controls: the ETL measuring nothing fails ("Ceres's orbit ... names no span it holds over"),
rounding the stated figure down fails on Ceres (7.1 against 7.12), and Nereid held to the general
ceiling fails at 11.19; the note and the date field without the span fail their named tests.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 19:57:16 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 d94451e203 Warm a host's planets by the luminosity the archive publishes for it, not one derived beside it
The ETL has carried each host's st_lum since 494fb56 and nothing read it: the card, the system
view's planet temperatures and the body pages all derived a luminosity from the star's magnitude
and colour. For 757 of the 4 440 hosts the archive gives one for, the two differ by more than
1.5 times, 667 of them stars the ETL placed from the archive's own V and B−V. Proxima read
8.9×10⁻⁴ L☉ beside the archive's radius and temperature, which imply 1.27×10⁻³; the archive gives
1.51×10⁻³, as Ribas et al. 2017 do.

starSurfaceOf now returns the luminosity with the radius and temperature, taken from the first of
the host's planets that gives one, as st_rad and st_teff already are, and derived only otherwise.
The system view lights its planets with it, the body page uses the same host rule, and the card
marks it derived only when it is. The derived radius still comes from the derived luminosity, so
its "from colour and brightness" stays true; only 3 hosts have st_lum and no st_rad.

Measured on the shipped catalogue against the parent commit: 544 of 3 639 planets with an
equilibrium temperature move by more than 10 %, and 98 change class. Kepler-186 f goes from a 292 K
rocky world to a 175 K icy one, LHS 1140 b from 152 K icy to 206 K temperate, LTT 1445 A b from
298 K rocky to 402 K scorched, Proxima Cen b from 200 to 228 K and d from 259 to 296 K.

starReadouts now takes the surface alone, which carries the luminosity. Controls, each failing its
named test: the archive's luminosity ignored (2 of 778 failed), called derived, the body page
warmed by the derived one, the body page reading the planet's own row only, and the card marking
a published luminosity derived (1 of 778 each).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 19:47:34 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 97b8dd9dc8 Turn the Sun about its IAU pole, once in 25.38 days, as every planet already is
Every body with IAU elements was turned by its pole and W, but the Sun, which is the system's star
marker and no BodyRecord, was built with an identity rotation and never touched: its pole pointed
at RA 90, Dec 0, 115.03 degrees from the WGCCRE 2015 solar pole (RA 286.13, Dec 63.87), and it
stood still where its W turns 14.1844 degrees a day.

SUN_ROTATIONAL_ELEMENTS carries NAIF body 10 from pck00011.tpc, and the ETL fails if they are not
the kernel's. The scene turns the star marker by bodyOrientation each tick when the star is the
Sun, as the renderer turns the planets. In the running app the Sun's drawn pole lies on the IAU's
(0.00 degrees) and its map turns 14.1844 degrees between 2026-01-01 and 01-02. The map's longitudes
are Solar System Scope's, not Carrington's, so the phase of W is not the Sun's own; the pole and
the rate are.

Controls: leaving the marker unturned fails "turns the Sun about its IAU pole, once in 25.38 days";
the app's elements off the kernel's (W rate 14.18) fails the ETL.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 19:21:15 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 2242fe0a7f Give every star a limb-darkened surface in its own colour, and light its planets with it
Every star but the Sun was a flat disc of one colour, and the Sun wore the texture pack's orange
photograph, lit by the same white light as every other star's planets.

Every star now shares one TSL material (starSurfaceMaterial in the scene): the Sun's map in grey,
times the colour of a blackbody at the star's temperature, times a linear limb-darkening law,
1 - 0.6 (1 - mu), the Sun's coefficient in the visible. The temperature is the one the radius
uses: the archive's st_teff for a host, else the dwarf sequence at its colour or type, else
the Sun's.
The colour comes from blackbodyColor (stellar.ts): Kim et al.'s cubic fit to the Planckian locus,
then CIE XYZ to linear sRGB, brightest channel 1. At D65 it gives 2 900 K (255, 180, 103), 5 800 K
(255, 241, 235) and 9 600 K (208, 219, 255), against (255, 182, 98), (255, 241, 231) and
(211, 221, 255) in Charity's integrated blackbody table. The tint is a uniform, so the shader is
built once and not per system.

The star's PointLight takes the same colour against the Sun's, since the planets' photographs
were taken in sunlight: the Sun's light stays white at pi, TRAPPIST-1's (2 566 K) is
(1, 0.44, 0.10) and Proxima's (2 900 K) (1, 0.52, 0.17), Sirius's (0.52, 0.67, 1). The intensity
stays pi. No halo comes back.

sun.jpg was 2048 by 1024 and 822 427 bytes for a disc that reaches 216 px across at the Sun's
closest approach on a 1080-line screen. It is now 1024 by 512 in grey, 31 306 bytes, which covers
the disc to a 1440-line screen. Its brightness varied by 56 % rms, which made every star a mottled
rock; it is rescaled to 14 % rms about the display's white, of the order of the Sun's granulation
contrast, the brighter half clipped as in a photograph exposed for the disc (6 % rms remains).

Measured on the dev server (1600 by 1000, the camera at its closest approach):
- the disc's brightness against the law, from r/R 0.52 to 0.97: Sun 0.970/0.841/0.763/0.657/0.560
  against 0.927/0.829/0.755/0.645/0.554, ups And and Sirius the same to within 0.05;
- the disc's centre in sRGB: Sun (245, 233, 226), ups And (F8V, 6 157 K) (249, 239, 239),
  Sirius (199, 209, 243);
- the first system entry of a fresh page, three runs each in alternating blocks against the
  previous commit: Sol's longest task 90 ms before, 86 ms after, two tasks over 50 ms in every
  run either way; Proxima Centauri's none over 50 ms after, one run of six with a 53 ms task
  before. The long tasks on Sol's first entry predate this change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-25 15:10:52 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 7213f987c4 Draw every star at its own radius, measured where the archive has one and derived otherwise
The system view drew the Sun at its own radius and every other star at 0.45 of its innermost
orbit, capped at 0.2 AU: a size chosen so the star would not swallow its planets, not the star's.
Proxima Centauri was drawn at 2.8 solar radii, eighteen times its own, and every star without
planets at 43.

starSurfaceOf (body-view-model.ts) now gives each star a radius and a temperature. A planet host
takes the archive's st_rad and st_teff from its planets' rows: 4 439 hosts are drawn at a
measured radius, 22 at a derived one. Every other star's is derived: its temperature off Pecaut & Mamajek's dwarf
sequence at its colour (the same table the spectral estimate reads, or at the colour its type
implies where it has none), its luminosity from its absolute magnitude and the bolometric
correction luminositySolar already applies, and R = sqrt(L) / (T / 5772 K)^2. Against the
archive's own st_rad for the 1 447 catalogue hosts that have one, the derived radius is within
0.018 dex at the median, 0.071 dex at the 90th percentile, and within a factor of 1.5 for
97.1 %. Sirius comes out 1.79 solar radii (1.711 published, Liebert et al. 2005), Wolf 359 0.117,
Betelgeuse 584, the Sun exactly 1.

A star with no band has only the ETL's stand-in magnitude, and gets no derived radius: PSR
J1719-1438 came out 2.3 solar radii from it, wider than its planet's orbit. With the stars that
have neither a colour nor a type, that leaves 3 077 of 455 608 stars (274 of 4 735 hosts) with
no radius; they are drawn at the Sun's, and their card gives none.

The card says which it is: "Radius 0.141 solar radii" for a published one, "~0.10 solar radii,
from colour and brightness" for a derived one, two figures because colour does not give three.

A giant drawn at its size can be wider than its system, so systemFramingDistanceAu also makes
room for the star, and the controls' closest approach is now three of the star's radii where
that is more than the old 0.05 AU. 23 211 stars are drawn wider than 3.6 solar radii, which put
0.05 AU inside three of their radii, and a zoom would have carried the camera through the
surface of the largest. The Sun keeps 0.05 AU. starMarkerRadiusAu and the renderer's innermost
axis, which only it read, are gone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-25 14:27:39 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 ac6a3bb1ea Let the reader set the clock to a date, and run it backwards
The clock from #33 could only run forwards from now. The Display panel's
clock now has a Date (UTC) field, a native datetime-local in a form, so Enter
submits it and the browser holds it to its min and max. It jumps the clock to
that date, and the clock carries on from there at the rate it was running at.
A Backwards toggle (aria-pressed) runs the same four rates the other way. The
radios still pick the rate's size and keep the direction when it changes.

The window is AD 1 to AD 3000. The end is where Standish's Table 2 stops
being fitted (3000 BC to AD 3000; every planet within 0.29 degrees of
Horizons at each date measured out to 3000). The start is the date input's
own floor. TimeStore.setDate refuses anything outside it, and NaN, and leaves
the clock where it was. The field is read as UTC. Its dates are proleptic
Gregorian, as a Date is, so before 1582 they run up to ten days ahead of the
Julian-calendar dates history gives. The window is written beside
CLOCK_WINDOW, with the moons' shorter reach (Phobos 11 degrees out by 2100).

The system note now names the date it is drawn for, to the minute:
"... to 2020-12-21 18:00 UTC.", or "to now, <date> UTC." at the present.

Measured in the app (port 4311, keyboard only: fill, Enter):
- Set to 2020-12-21 18:00 UTC, Jupiter and Saturn seen from Earth's drawn
  position are 0.113 degrees apart. Horizons gives 0.102 geocentric
  (geometric 0.1017, astrometric 0.1018). Distances: 5.9267 and 10.8296 AU
  against Horizons' 5.9258 and 10.8270.
- 3001-06-01 is refused by the form (validity false) and the clock does not
  move.
- Backwards at 1 d/s: -2.011 days in about 2 s.
- The field's accessible name is "Date (UTC)" and its description is the
  window. Its colour-scheme is dark, so the picker icon shows on the HUD.
- Back to now puts the field back on the present too.

Unit suite 799 -> 805: two tests for the store, three for the dock, one for
the scene note. Eleven guarded mutants; each changed its file and made its
named test fail. Among them: the window check dropped, the wall clock not
re-anchored on a jump, the radio dropping the direction, the field read as
local time, and the note not naming the date.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-25 00:05:50 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 5333be615e Estimate a spectral type from each star's colour where no catalogue gives one, and say so
383 695 of the 455 608 stars read "Spectral type Unknown", every Gaia star among them, although
380 884 of them carry a colour. The card now gives those the type of the dwarf whose colour is
nearest, in the colour's own system, marked as an estimate: TRAPPIST-1, BP-RP 4.90, reads
"Spectral type ~M8, from colour", which is how it was classified (M8 V). A star with neither a
type nor a colour gets no subtitle rather than the literal "Unknown".

The colours are Pecaut & Mamajek's mean dwarf sequence (2013, ApJS 208, 9, table 5), as Mamajek
maintains it online (version 2022.04.16, which carries Gaia BP-RP), from B0 to M8.5. B-V cannot
tell O types apart (the whole sequence spans 0.03 of it), and BP-RP turns back past M8.5 and is
tabulated only from B9. A colour outside the table gets no estimate: 186 BP-RP and 41 B-V colours,
among them the blue Gaia DR3 5612323414549657984 at BP-RP -0.15.

380 657 stars get an estimate: F 97 840, G 144 327, K 105 984, M 29 142, A 3 272, B 92. Checked
against catalogued types:
- 19 433 HYG dwarfs with a B-V: 74.3 % within two subclasses, 95.5 % within five.
- 146 Gaia exoplanet hosts the archive types as dwarfs, from BP-RP: 88.4 % within two
  subclasses, 98.6 % within five.
The estimate assumes a dwarf, so a giant reads later than it is (Pollux, K0 III at B-V 0.99,
reads K3). It also ignores reddening. The comment says both.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 23:28:29 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 a81dd491ad Say which band each star was measured in, whose catalogue it is, and how sure its distance is
The readout named Hipparcos, Yale and Gliese while 378 775 of the 455 608 stars are described by
Gaia DR3, printed one "Magnitude" for G and V alike, and gave every distance to the parsec. The
band cannot be read off the star's source, which records whose position it has: 62 002 stars Gaia
places keep HYG's V and B-V, and the 575 hosts renamed after their planets are Gaia's, in G.

stars-meta.bin gains two byte columns, 14 to 16 bytes a star (6 378 512 to 7 289 728 bytes; gzip
-9 2 804 049 to 3 110 991). One holds the magnitude's band (V 76 555 stars, G 378 744, none 309,
whose magnitude is a stand-in), which colour the colour index is (B-V 75 203, BP-RP 376 703), and
whether the distance is Gaia's parallax. The other holds the distance's relative error as its
square root in 255ths: a step is 0.08 % of distance at 1 %, 0.35 % at 20 %, and 100 % is the top.
encode, decode, BYTES_PER_STAR_META and the build.ts round trip cover both; no workflow reads the
format.

Where the errors come from:
- Gaia rows keep the parallax_error their query already fetched: median 0.3 %, 90th percentile
  1.2 %, at most 20 %, the query's own cut.
- A HYG star at Gaia's distance takes the cross-match's parallax_over_error, and a star merged
  into a Gaia entry keeps that entry's error with its position.
- The 3 067 Hipparcos stars that keep their Hipparcos distance, Rigel, Deneb and Alnilam among
  them, take e_plx from van Leeuwen's 2007 reduction: a new cached query of
  public.hipparcos_newreduction on the ESA archive, whose 117 955 rows HYG's distances invert.
- The archive's stars take sy_disterr1/2 from pscomppars, in a query and cache file of their own
  so the composite rows already cached were not refetched.
- 439 distances have no published error: 357 Gliese rows and 82 archive hosts.

Of the errors, 392 786 are 1 % or less and are not printed; 61 156 print as "117 ± 12 pc" to the
distance's own digits; 1 196 between 20 and 100 %, and 30 past it, print as the range the
parallax gives, since a symmetric error in parallax is a lopsided one in distance.

The star card (measured on the dev server) now reads, for example:
- Rigel: 265 ± 23 pc, V 0.18, B-V -0.03, source HYG.
- Deneb: 433 ± 60 pc.
- Alnilam: "476 pc to 833 pc" (Hipparcos 1.65 ± 0.45 mas).
- Gaia DR3 5612323414549657984: 111 ± 2 pc, G 4.63, BP-RP -0.15, source Gaia DR3.
- Proxima Centauri: 1.30 pc, V 11.01, source "HYG, Gaia DR3 distance".
- TRAPPIST-1: G 15.62, BP-RP 4.90, source Gaia DR3.
- Kepler-186: V 15.14, source NASA Exoplanet Archive.
The neighbourhood's subtitle reads "Gaia DR3 378,775 · HYG 73,556 · NASA Exoplanet Archive
3,277", counted by the catalogue describing each star.

build.ts validateStars now fails a catalogue with more than 1 000 stars without a band (309
today) or without a distance error (439). Dropping G from the Gaia rows gave 379 040 without a
band, and dropping their parallax_error gave 441 216 without an error; both runs failed.

Decoding the catalogue in Node took a median 29 ms before and 24 ms after (nine runs each, within
noise). In the app, five cold boots gave a 654-786 ms long task after the data landed and the
HUD at 1.83-2.07 s.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 23:26:27 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 1d42be2ad5 Add Charon, the moons of Uranus, Saturn's other large moons and the four dwarf planets past Pluto's table
The solar system stopped at 18 bodies: Pluto without Charon, Uranus without a moon, Saturn with
Titan alone, no dwarf planet but Pluto (audit #22). bodies.json now holds 38: the eight planets,
the five IAU dwarf planets, and every moon in JPL's mean-element table more than 100 km in mean
radius. New: Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake; Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Hyperion,
Iapetus, Phoebe; Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon; Nereid, Proteus; Charon. Search finds
each by name (it indexes bodies.json), each has a body page, and the Sun's system draws them.

Where they come from
- Moons: the same archived JPL satellite table as the others. Uranus's and Pluto's are given
  against the planet's equator, with the IAU WGCCRE 2015 poles: Pluto's as the IAU gives it
  (132.993, -6.163), Uranus's at the end the table measures inclinations from (77.311, 15.175)
  with its nodes counted 180 degrees on, from the IAU pole's crossing; read without that offset
  every Uranian moon was 180 degrees from Horizons at every date from 1980 to 2100.
- Two rows are corrected where they disagree with JPL's own ephemeris and the reason is known.
  Pluto's section prints epoch 2000 Jan 1.0; JPL's current table gives Charon's as 2000-01-01.5,
  and at 1.0 Charon was 27.8-28.2 degrees from Horizons at every date, half a day of its motion.
  Phoebe's mean motion gives 548.02 days where its Horizons page and the current table give
  550.30 (the table's own note says its source misstated retrograde moons' mean motions); on the
  row's figure Phoebe was 24.6 degrees out by 2025 and 100 by 2075.
- Dwarf planets: JPL SBDB osculating heliocentric elements with their epoch (2026 Jun 9), carried
  at their own n. Against Horizons (heliocentric, 1950-2300; the clock only runs forward from now):
  Ceres 0.02 degrees in 2025, 1.9 in 2050, 4.0 in 2075, 5.3 in 2100, 11.6 in 2200 (Jupiter pulls
  on it and nothing here carries that); Eris within 0.06 to 2100 and 0.5 to 2300; Haumea within
  0.35 to 2100; Makemake within 0.25 to 2100 and 1.7 by 2200.
- Size and spin: Horizons pages for the moons (Charon 606 km, Miranda 235.7 as the mean of its
  three axes). The SBDB for Ceres (469.7 km, 9.074 h) and for the other three's spins (Eris 25.9 h,
  Haumea 3.915 h, Makemake 22.83 h). Neither source nor the WGCCRE 2015 report has a radius for
  Eris, Haumea or Makemake, so each carries its stellar-occultation measurement: Eris 1163 km
  (Sicardy et al. 2011), Makemake 715 (Brown 2013, the mean of 1434 x 1434 x 1422 km), and
  Haumea 797.6, the radius of a sphere of its volume: it is triaxial, 1161 x 852 x 513 km
  (Ortiz et al. 2017), and is drawn as that sphere.
- Rotation uses the branch's model. Every moon is locked except three: Hyperion's page says
  "Chaotic" and Nereid's gives no spin, so both are left still; Phoebe turns in 9.274 h.
- Charon carries massRatio 0.12205, the GM ratio of the two Horizons pages (106.10 / 869.326), so
  it and Pluto are drawn round their barycentre 2 131 km from Pluto's centre.

Validators (tools/etl/build.ts, on the real catalogue; full npm run etl passes)
- Offsets from Horizons on 2025-01-01, new bodies: dwarf planets at most 0.016 degrees (Ceres),
  under the 0.25 ceiling; moons Dione 0.009, Ariel 0.058, Rhea 0.070, Charon 0.111, Oberon 0.142,
  Titania 0.185, Umbriel 0.219, Proteus 0.245, Enceladus 0.309, Phoebe 0.984, Miranda 1.162,
  Tethys 2.042, under the 2.5 ceiling, which is unchanged.
- Four moons get their own ceiling, each just above its worst offset at twelve dates from 1980
  to 2100 and each named with its reason: Mimas 46 (measured up to 44.7: its resonance with
  Tethys swings its longitude 44 degrees either way over 70.8 years, which the table has no
  column for), Hyperion 21 (20.2; held in resonance by Titan, and the row's eccentricity 0.0232
  is under a quarter of the current table's 0.105), Iapetus 11 (10.1; the row sits 9.4 degrees
  behind Horizons at its own epoch and keeps that, with its plane within 0.07 degrees and its
  period within 0.001 per cent), Nereid 3 (2.6 in 2025; eccentricity 0.75).
- New checks: every body has a radius over 0 (Charon's would have been 0 before the page
  parser learnt its form); a freely spinning moon is not locked; a moon with a mass ratio puts
  the barycentre outside its planet; there are 5 dwarf planets.
- Negative controls, each a full npm run etl on the real catalogue refused with the named
  message: Uranus's node offset removed (Miranda 172.50 degrees), Charon at the printed epoch
  (28.08), Phoebe on the row's mean motion (24.61), Charon's radius unread (no radius),
  free spinners locked (Hyperion), mass ratio inverted (barycentre 17 460 km out).

Measured in the running app (port 4311): the Sun's system has 38 members ("13 + 25 moons");
Charon comes back to within 0.0004 degrees of where it started after 6.38723 days and is 179.98
degrees round after half that; Pluto is 2 130.6 km from the barycentre and Charon 17 456.8,
exactly opposite; Saturn's moons in order of distance now: Mimas 185 617 km, Enceladus 238 042,
Tethys 294 648, Dione 376 805, Rhea 526 964, Titan 1 231 389, Hyperion 1 470 453, Iapetus
3 637 059, Phoebe 11 740 900. At the arrival framing the dwarf planets are held at the 3 px
floor and the moons at 1.5 px, half their planet's drawn radius, the scene's existing rule.
Searching Charon, Enceladus, Ceres, Titania, Makemake and Phoebe each finds the body; the body
pages show Charon 6.39 d and 606 km, Titania 8.71 d, Ceres 4.6 yr and 470 km, Haumea 283 yr and
798 km, Hyperion 21.3 d, each with its orbit source. Long tasks on entering: see the previous
commit.

The Sun's note now says the four dwarf planets are on the SBDB's osculating elements. Holding
Eris's orbit, the arrival framing widens: 192 AU of range on a 1600 x 1000 window, under the
200 AU ceiling.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 21:54:56 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 2e5daa0f97 Give every body the period it is drawn going round in, and say where its orbit comes from
Audit #38: Europa's card listed its axis, eccentricity and inclination but no period, while the
scene turned it round Jupiter all the same: heliocentricPeriodDays refused every moon, since the
catalogue carried no planet masses.

Every solar-system body's period is now 360 over the JPL mean motion that carries it round the
scene, filed under Measured since that is JPL's published figure: Europa 3.55 d, the Moon 27.3 d,
Saturn 29.5 yr on the live cards, Earth 365.2564 d. heliocentricPeriodDays is gone. Exoplanets
keep the archive's period, or none.

The card's provenance line now ends with where the orbit comes from, "Orbit: JPL SSD satellite
mean elements, epoch 1997 Jan 16." for Europa, "Orbit: JPL approximate mean elements (Standish),
fit for 3000 BC to AD 3000." for a planet, and the Sun's system note says so too: "Orbits
propagated from JPL mean elements, the planets' fit for 3000 BC to AD 3000, to the current
date." Other systems keep "published elements". All three read in the running app.

Each has a test that fails without it (moons refused a period, provenance without the orbit, a
note without the source).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 20:20:51 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 c38a42cbcb Fix what the review of this branch found, starting with the pick rule it only claimed
The off-screen rule for clicks was described in 3f0abf8 and in the pull request, but only its
comment was committed: pickAt still let the slop reach past the frame. The mutant that was said
to catch it matched nothing, and an unrelated flaky test failed instead. The frame test is now in
pickAt, before the slop, and its test fails without it (star at NDC 1.01, click at 0.995).

Venus, Uranus and Pluto turned forwards: Horizons states a retrograde spin twice, by a negative
rate and by an obliquity over 90 degrees, and both were applied. The period's sign is now used
only when no obliquity is known. Measured on the live markers, spin axis against orbit normal is
cos(obliquity) for each: Venus -0.999, Uranus -0.135, Pluto -0.494, Earth 0.917.

Moons listed as rates rather than "Synchronous" drifted about 5 degrees an orbit and Titan did not
turn: every moon is now locked at its Kepler period. Pluto's obliquity comes from IAU WGCCRE 2015,
Horizons gives none.

Also:
- the star's light is white at pi, not a warm 2.2 that left the photographs dim;
- procedural textures are 128x64, not 512x256 that froze the main thread ~60 ms a body;
- Io, Pluto, Titan and Deimos lose their "maps", which were disc photographs with black sky;
- an exoplanet with only a mass gets a radius from it (M^0.55, capped at Jupiter), not Earth's;
- the clock knows when it has left the present even once back at real time, so the date and
  "Back to now" stay up.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 18:50:07 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 468c98b14a Surface the system view with the photographs it already had, lit by its star
Every body in the system view was an unlit sphere wearing a 32 by 16 pixel
procedural texture — the size chosen when a marker was a few pixels across and
what survived was its average colour. The thirteen real photographs in
`src/assets/textures/bodies/` were used only by the detail page. So Mars was a
pale grey ball with invented polar caps while its own NASA mosaic sat unread in
the repository, and nothing had a day side or a night side.

Each marker now takes its own photograph where one exists, at the size the
detail page uses, and the derived texture only where none does — the five moons
no probe mapped, and every exoplanet, none of which has ever been imaged. The
material is lit, and the light is a point at the star, so each world shows the
terminator where it really falls.

The light does not fall off with distance. Under the inverse square that real
light obeys, Neptune receives a thousandth of what Mercury does and reads as
black; the map is a set of worlds to look at rather than a light meter, so each
is lit as a photograph of it would be. That is the same concession the pixel
floor makes for size, and it is only about brightness: the *direction* is real.

Spheres are 32 by 24 rather than 16 by 12, since at true scale a body is drawn
anywhere from a pixel to the whole frame and the old silhouette was visibly
faceted at the near end.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 12:03:24 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 4b276e44a5 Give the map a clock, so the sky it computes can be watched
The orbits and the rotations are both functions of a date, and the only date the
map ever asked for was this instant. So a view built on propagated ephemerides
showed a still picture: Earth turns 15 degrees an hour and takes a year to go
round, and a reader watching for a minute saw nothing move at all.

`TimeStore` is that date, at a rate the reader sets: real time, an hour a
second, a day a second, a month a second. It is read once a frame rather than
held in a signal — it changes continuously, and a signal changing sixty times a
second would ask the whole HUD to re-render for a number nothing is watching.
Changing the rate re-anchors rather than rewinding, so speeding up and slowing
down never jumps the sky, and "Back to now" returns to the world's own time.

Measured in the app, three seconds of watching in the Sun's system:

| rate | sky elapsed | Earth turned | Jupiter moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| real time | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 h/s | 3.0 h | 45.12 deg | 0.0009 AU |
| 1 d/s | 3.0 d | (three full turns) | 0.0222 AU |

45.12 degrees in three hours is 15.04 an hour, which is Earth's own sidereal
rate, and Jupiter's 0.0222 AU in three days is its own orbital speed.

The rates are radio buttons, not toggles: they are one of four, and the native
control carries that to a screen reader and to the arrow keys with no script.
The date joins the strip only while the clock is running faster than the world,
since at real time it is today's, which the reader's machine already says.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-22 10:59:28 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 3f0abf8717 Draw the system at true scale, drop the halo, and refuse to enter what is off screen
Three changes to what the system view claims, all of them the same claim: that
the sizes on screen mean something.

**The halo is gone.** It was a sprite sized against the arrival frame — 1.12 AU
for the Sun — so it stayed that wide as the camera closed in and ended up a flat
gradient filling the screen, over the photograph it was meant to dress. It
existed to keep the star visible at a framing that holds the whole system, which
is now handled in pixels instead.

**Bodies are drawn at their own radius.** The old marker size was exaggerated
and scaled to the system span, and clamped: Jupiter and Ganymede both ran past
the ceiling and were drawn at one radius, so every moon orbited inside its
planet, and Phobos and Triton sat entirely within Mars and Neptune. True scale
needs no rule against that — physics already puts a moon outside the planet it
orbits. What it costs is visibility at the arrival framing, where every body is
sub-pixel, so the scene floors each marker at 3 px on screen and holds a moon to
half its planet's drawn size. Measured in the Sun's system: at arrival, planets
3 px and moons 1.5 px, against 3 px for everything before; at Jupiter, the
planet 10.8 px at scale 1 with the Galilean moons on their orbits outside it.

The Sun is drawn at its own radius too. Every other star keeps a size derived
from its innermost orbit, because no stellar radius reaches the app — Gaia's
`radius_gspphot` is the obvious next fetch.

**A click cannot enter a system that is not on screen.** The picker tested depth
but not the frame, and a star's hit area is its drawn size plus a slop, so a
click in the last pixels of the view could fly into a system outside it, with
nothing on screen to explain where it had gone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-21 17:26:32 +02:00
Senrokai 56870fd9fe Merge pull request #31 from avalon-vanguard/fix/grid-rings
Size the distance rings by what the frame reaches, and keep their labels off the star names
2026-09-18 19:01:15 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 0c5efec505 Measure the ring span along the plane the rings lie in
The span went to `distanceRings` as the target's straight-line distance from the
Sun, but a ring of radius r passes within |r - p| of the view's centre, where p
is how far out that centre is *along* the galactic plane. For a target above the
plane the two differ by its height, so the band was centred on a radius no ring
has — and `ringLabels` picks its bearing by comparing its own in-plane distance
against the innermost ring, a comparison the new first ring quietly broke.

Two comments and a constant, from the same review. A frame short of the survey
edge gets its callout only when its last ring overshoots it: 245 pc does, 235 pc
does not, which is now a test rather than a sentence. The ring count can reach
16, not 14, now that the span need not start at the Sun. And a ring label was
measured as 135 px of star name when "50 pc" is a third of that, which rejected
rungs a hand's breadth clear of the name: RING_LABEL_REACH_NDC, 0.23, is the
widest of them — "1.5 kpc" with "Survey edge" under it.

Three mutants, three caught. Measured again in the app: unchanged for a star in
the plane (4 labels at 20 pc above it, 7 at 2 pc), and the rings now follow the
plane for one 195 pc above it rather than ringing a place the grid does not
reach.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 15:57:44 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 7fba48c808 Answer the review: size the rings to the band the frame covers, and clear the text
The rings are centred on the Sun and the frame need not be. Sizing their step
from how far the frame reaches — 210 pc for a star at 190 with the camera 20 pc
back — gives 20 pc rings at 180 and 200, both outside a frame 19 pc deep, so a
view away from the Sun still had no ring on it and no ladder of labels either.
`distanceRings` now takes the span the frame covers rather than its far edge,
and the step is a fifth of that: 5 pc rings from 165 to 210 for the same view.

Measured in the app, centred on a star 187 pc out in the galactic plane: 4 ring
labels drawn 20 pc above the plane and 7 from 2 pc, against 1 and none before.

The clearance was a radius around the anchor, and a label is a line of text
hanging 135 px to one side of its anchor: at 0.065 NDC apart, past the radius,
"50 pc" printed inside "Alpha Centauri". It is now tested against the span the
name occupies, on the side it hangs, with the radius kept for the pair whose
text runs the other way.

Also from the review: the ladder in the clearance test was built at exactly the
constant it tests, so 1057 of 2000 camera poses would have decided it by float
round-trip error — the rungs now sit 0.02 either side of the rule. And two
comments that were wrong: a frame one step short of the survey edge does get its
callout, and CSS2DRenderer hides a label behind the camera rather than drawing
it at the page edge.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 15:01:05 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 1a53f26474 Answer the review: say which search gave up, and let the bisection earn its offer
The panel printed "No route at this range." beside the range it was offering —
which is the sentence this branch exists to stop it printing. It was gated on
there being no offer, and a search that gives up usually has one: Sol to
HD 120147 at 4.5 pc spends the budget, offers 4.83 pc, and says there is no
route where a 71-jump route exists. The wording now follows the search at the
range that was asked for, and nothing else.

That needs the two give-ups kept apart, so `least` travels beside `gaveUp` to
the panel: one says the asked range was not searched out, the other that the
search for a range that would work was. HIP 69445 at 3 pc — asked-range search
exhaustive in 44 ms, ceiling probe out of budget — used to read "Too many stars
to search at this range." and now reads "No route at this range.", with nothing
claimed after it.

Two more from the same review. The budget flag was read off the settled count,
so a search that proved a dead end with the last star it was allowed reported a
give-up; it now records why the loop stopped. And the bisection's cap could fire
before a single probe had narrowed anything, leaving the ceiling route's own
longest hop as the answer: star 1000115173 at 3 pc was told to go to 8.00 pc,
the control's maximum, for a crossing that works at 6. It now offers 6.93.

Measured in the app, all three: "Too many stars to search at this range.
4.90 pc would reach.", "No route at this range." alone, and 7.00 pc in place of
8.00. The duplicated dead-end test now asks the question it was named for —
exactly the budget's worth of stars reaching each other and none of them the
destination — and each fix kills its own mutant.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 14:46:47 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 5dec528cee Size the distance rings by what the frame reaches, and keep their labels off the star names
From the review of #19. The rings are distances from the Sun, but their step was taken from
`effectiveDistance`, which under the plan view means the extent of the frame rather than how far
the camera is from the Sun. Centred on a star 200 pc out and flipped to 2D, the grid became rings
of 2 to 20 pc: not one of them on screen. The step now comes from where the view is centred plus
how far the camera is orbiting it, which is the same distance under either projection.

The set was also rebuilt while the grid was hidden, and every rebuild disposes the rings and
builds every vertex again; it now happens only while the grid is drawn.

The ring labels went straight to the overlay: never culled to the frame, and free to land on a
star's name. They now have to be on screen and clear of the names already placed, by half the
separation two names keep — they are a ladder up one ray a twentieth of the screen apart, and
holding them apart from each other would take "Survey edge" off the map.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 13:24:16 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 862fb65ea4 Tell a search that gave up from a route that is not there
The route search stops after MAX_VISITED stars and returned null, which everything downstream read
as "the catalogue holds no chain". On the real catalogue that was wrong for real questions: Sol to
HD 120147 (136 pc) at 5 pc is 50 jumps, and the panel said there was no route. The budget also sat
under what the shipped catalogue needs, so it is now 40 000 rather than 20 000: both that route and
a star at 170 pc are found, and Sol to HD 2626 at 6 pc, which used to be refused after 4.7 s, plots
56 jumps in about 2 s.

A search now reports whether it gave up. The range search no longer counts a give-up as proof that
nothing routes below it — that is what reported ranges up to 29% too wide — and it stops after two
of them, since those are the probes that cost the most and settle the least: for HD 2626 at 3 pc it
offers 5.92 pc in about 4 s, against 6.13 pc in 4.7 s. At the panel's widest range the refused route
and the range search are the same question, so it is asked once. Where nothing can be said, the
panel says "Too many stars to search at this range." rather than claiming there is no route.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 12:49:18 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 539a0f0a3e Answer the review: budget in drawn pixels, re-ask when the budget moves, sort only the band it runs out in
- The budget counted CSS pixels; lines are drawn in device pixels, so a screen scaled to 150% or
  200% drew 1.5-2x the calibrated line. It now counts the canvas's drawn pixels.
- A graph was re-asked only when the drawn stars changed, so with a star budget covering the whole
  catalogue, or a resize, its budget and centre stayed wherever the layer was turned on. A view that
  chose its stars again now asks, and a graph is rebuilt when the stars, the range or the budget
  changed (the budget by more than half the margin, or its centre by more than 5 pc).
- From inside a system the budget was worked out in astronomical units about the system's origin.
  Graphs are now asked for in parsec space only; the flight back out asks.
- Comparing budgets let a request re-asked with a slightly different one supersede its twin, and the
  twin's rejection cleared the state of the request that replaced it. A rejection now clears it only
  for the latest request.
- The worker sorted every link to keep a few thousand, 2.2x an unbudgeted build. It now bands links
  by distance, keeps every band before the one the budget runs out in, and sorts only that one:
  142-168 ms on the real catalogue against 233-388 ms, 103 ms unbudgeted, returning early when all fit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-17 19:03:11 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 bd5e9d4b0d Budget the jump-link layer in pixels of line, nearest the view's centre first
With the drawn set following the view, the layer at 8 pc cost the integrated Radeon 503 ms a frame
at 30 pc from the Sun. Measured, the cost follows the length of line on screen (about 10 ms per
million pixels near the Sun), not the number of links: 100 000 links were 12 ms at the opening
view, 25 000 were 61 ms at 30 pc. So the budget is a length: a million pixels, turned into parsecs
at the depth the view is centred on, spent on the links nearest that centre by their nearer end.
Orbiting with links at 8 pc on the iGPU: 12-18 ms p50 at every pose measured, no long tasks.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-17 18:23:55 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 9631ddf0a4 Answer the review: keep up with flights frame by frame, respect portrait frames, and let links follow an orbit
- Flights: the drawn stars were checked once a label pass, and a flight outruns that. Leaving a
  system jumps the camera to face another way, then zooms out forty-fold in a second: 74-83% of
  the stars that belong on screen were missing on the first frames back in parsec space, 33-50%
  before each re-choice on the way out. While the rig animates, the check now runs every frame.
  Probe on real flights (Gl 806, Barnard's Star, out): 0.90-1.00 of a fresh choice drawn on
  screen in flight, 1.00 on the frame of the jump; frame p95 12.2 ms, no long tasks. Choosing for
  the whole sky during flights was tried first and measured worse (0.15-0.18).
- Portrait frames: the turn and pan limits use the narrower half-extent, not the height.
- Links: a new drawn set arms the rebuild timer only when none is pending, so a continuous orbit
  gets a graph at most every 250 ms instead of never; an unchanged set asks for nothing.
- The centre-move test lets the first pass happen before moving the centre.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-17 17:57:29 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 6cd0666067 Draw what the camera shows: the budget goes to the stars in view
The drawn set was two spheres, around the view's centre and around the Sun, then the brightest
stars anywhere, so most of the budget sat behind or beside the camera: at 30 pc from the Sun
15.8% of the drawn stars were on screen, at 5 pc 9.1%, in a plan view zoomed to 10 pc 3.8%.

The same tiers are now taken only from the camera's frame, widened by a quarter
(VIEW_MARGIN), with the planet hosts in view drawn first after the pinned stars, so every ring
circles a star that can be clicked. The set is chosen again at the label cadence once the view
has turned, zoomed or moved half the margin, switched projection or been resized, and once for
the whole sky on the way out to the Galaxy. Drawn stars on screen: 74-76% at 30 pc, 73-75% at
5 pc, 66% in the zoomed plan view, 91.5% at the opening view.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-17 17:04:08 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 7064e34d02 Choose the drawn stars in one walk of the brightness order
Same stars in the same order, for less: one walk of the brightness index, reading positions laid
out in that order, sorts the view's neighbourhood, the Sun's and the rest as it goes, instead of
gathering both neighbourhoods in catalogue order and sorting them. A refocus in the page drops
from 11.3 ms to 4.6 ms (median; worst 19.1 to 7.1). This comes before the drawn set follows the
camera's turns, which makes refocusing far more frequent.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-17 16:22:50 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 c6206a8311 Link only the stars that are drawn
The jump-link graph linked the whole catalogue: 3.7 million links at 8 pc, 7.4-7.8 s in the
worker and a 443-515 ms frame on the main thread when they landed, and most of them between stars
that were neither drawn nor clickable. A graph request now carries the star field's drawn stars,
and the worker links only those, over an index of its own with cells as wide as the range. The
scene asks again once a new drawn set has held still for 250 ms.

The renderer is handed the graph's bounding sphere instead of computing it: three.js walked every
vertex on the main thread in the first frame that drew a new graph, 48-55 ms at 8 pc.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-17 16:16:38 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 f156e03822 Answer the review: send the worker one request at a time, keep only the latest, and never wait for a dead one
The adversarial review confirmed three defects in this PR, all reproduced in
the browser.

1. Superseded graphs queued up in front of routes. The worker answers
   messages one at a time and cannot drop one it has started. With the
   jump-link layer on, every pause on the range slider posted a full graph
   build, seconds of work at 6-8 pc. Answers no longer wanted were thrown
   away only once built. A route asked for afterwards waited behind every
   one of them: a one-jump route took 44 s.

   RoutingClient now holds requests and sends them one at a time. While one
   is out, only the latest of each kind waits: a newer graph replaces an
   older one before it is ever built, and the older promise is rejected with
   SupersededRequest. Routes go ahead of graphs. The same question asked
   again while outstanding shares the answer rather than being worked twice,
   as when the layer is turned off and on during a build.

   The same scenario in the browser (layer on, range stepped 5 -> 8 pc with
   400 ms pauses, then Sol to Proxima): the route came back in 110 ms. The
   worker was sent "links 3, links 5, route, links 8"; 6 and 7 were never
   built.

2. A worker that failed left the panel stuck. With no error handling, a
   worker that failed to load (a 404 on its chunk after a redeploy) or
   threw left "Plotting…" and a disabled button for good, and a graph at a
   range could not be asked for again.

   The worker now answers an exception with a 'failed' message, which
   rejects that request. A worker that fails to load or dies is abandoned,
   and what it left outstanding, and everything asked afterwards, is
   answered in place. The scene releases the panel when a route fails, and
   forgets a graph range that was never drawn so it can be asked for again.

3. Nothing type-checked the worker. The application builder never reads
   webWorkerTsConfig, and bundles the worker with esbuild, which strips
   types without checking them. tsconfig.app.json leaves the file out. A
   type error in the worker shipped.

   `npm run worker:typecheck` (tsc -p tsconfig.worker.json) now runs in CI
   beside the other project checks. webWorkerTsConfig is removed from
   angular.json, since it only suggested that something checked the worker.

Tests with a fake worker cover one request at a time, a waiting graph
replaced and a route sent ahead of it, a question shared, a failure rejected
and the next request sent, and a failed worker's requests answered in place.
A scene test covers the panel released after a failed route. Negative
controls, each caught: several requests sent at once, a waiting graph kept,
graphs ahead of routes, a question asked twice, a failure answered as a
success, a failed worker waited on, the panel left pending, and a type error
in the worker (caught by worker:typecheck).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 15:27:50 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 965739e99e Merge branch 'feat/drawn-set-follows-view' into perf/routing-worker
The label and star-field review fixes arrive under the routing client: the
scene keeps constructing RoutingClient beside the neighbourhood, and builds
the brightness index where it built the order. Both sides' new scene tests
are kept.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 15:14:13 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 86e143131e Answer the review: pin by the index the neighbourhood holds, and choose again only when it can matter
The adversarial review confirmed three costs this PR added, all reproduced in
the browser.

- The first pinned refocus stalled the first flight of a session. The
  renderer built its own id-to-index Map of 423 651 entries the first time a
  star was pinned, which is at the first selection, inside the approach
  flight. The worst frame was 47-103 ms, and the Map stayed as a second copy
  of a lookup the scene already had. The scene now pins by catalogue index,
  through the StarNeighbourhood it builds at load (new `indexOf`), and the
  renderer takes indices. First selection, measured in the browser: worst
  frame 18 ms.

- At galactic scale every label pass rewrote the drawn set. The view centre
  sweeps hundreds of parsecs a pass there, far past any star, so each pass
  chose the same 70 000 stars again and uploaded 2 MB to the GPU: 11 times
  on the flight out to the Galaxy. The scene no longer refocuses at galactic
  scale, where the whole catalogue is a few pixels, and the renderer leaves
  its buffers alone when the drawn set is unchanged. Flight to the Galaxy:
  2 refocuses, no frame over 50 ms.

- At load the same set was chosen twice: once by the renderer's constructor
  around the Sun, and again by the first label pass, centred on the Sun. The
  scene now records the constructor's choice as the current focus.

Tests: the buffers keep their version for an unchanged set, no refocus at
load, none at galactic scale, and pins arrive as indices. Proxima's id in the
scene spec now differs from its index, so a lookup by id cannot pass for one
by index. Negative controls, each caught: an unchanged set rewritten anyway, a
refocus at galactic scale, the boot choice not recorded, and pins passed as
ids.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 15:12:46 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 c3fcb2e481 Merge branch 'perf/label-scan' into feat/drawn-set-follows-view
The label fix turns the brightness order into an index with positions and ids
laid out beside it. The star field only needs the order, so it is handed
`.order`. Both sides added scene tests in the same place; both are kept.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 15:11:29 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 b071d87d8a Answer the review: walk the brightness order in memory order, and stop at the fifteenth label
The adversarial review confirmed a regression in this PR. Near the Sun, the
label pass became three to four times slower than the scan and sort it
replaced.

Within about 11 pc of the Sun, and in any plan view zoomed tighter than that,
the label radius clamps to 4 pc. That sphere holds a few dozen faint dwarfs
deep in the brightness order, so the walk rarely finds fifteen stars to name
and reads nearly the whole catalogue. Reading the star objects in brightness
order jumps all over memory, so a full walk took 19-25 ms against the old
5-6 ms.

The review also found that spreadLabels checked the label count at the top of
its loop. After placing the fifteenth label it asked for a sixteenth
candidate, which near the Sun can lie at the far end of the order.

brightnessIndex now lays each star's position and id out beside the
brightness order, in that order. The walk tests stars from those arrays in
sequence and reads a star object only when it yields one. spreadLabels breaks
straight after placing the fifteenth label.

Measured on the real catalogue with the label logic reduced to what decides
placement, camera at the given distance from the Sun (old sort / this PR as
first pushed / now):
  2 pc    4.9 / 24.7 / 2.5 ms
  5 pc    5.7 / 23.0 / 3.1 ms
  10 pc   6.3 / 18.2 / 0.95 ms
  307 pc  22  / 0.01 / 0.00 ms (the opening view)
The labels are identical in every case. Now faster than the old sort at every
distance.

A new scene test counts the candidates spreadLabels takes: exactly fifteen for
fifteen labels. Negative controls, each caught: positions one axis off, ids in
catalogue order, the selected star dropped, the radius edge excluded, and the
count checked before taking a candidate.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 15:04:51 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 8c69a7a8b2 Plot routes and build the jump-link graph in a Web Worker
Route plotting ran on the main thread, and so did the jump-link graph:

- the range search for a far target, HD 2626 at 236 pc, takes 4-5 s;
- the graph at 8 pc is 3.7 million links, 6-10 s to build, then as many
  link objects again to turn into vertices.

The map stopped for as long as either ran.

A Web Worker now does both. RoutingClient sends it the catalogue's ids and
positions once, and it keeps its own spatial index. A route question comes
back with the route, or with the range that would open one. A graph comes
back as one Float32Array of segment vertices, transferred rather than
copied.

On the scene side, only the latest route request is shown: an earlier
answer arriving later is dropped. Only the graph for the range last asked
for is drawn. The Routes panel says "Plotting…" and holds its button while
a request is out.

collectJumpLinks gave way to jumpLinkSegments, which writes the vertex pairs
straight into floats rather than building link objects first; the scene was
its only caller. The routing module (routing.ts) is the message protocol and
the one function answering it, so the worker is a dozen lines, and the same
answers are worked out in place where there is no Worker, as in the unit
tests' DOM. The worker is built with its own tsconfig, as the Angular
builder expects.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 14:17:26 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 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
2026-09-16 14:11:42 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 0a0b301807 Name the brightest stars by walking one order, instead of sorting 60 000 five times a second
The star labels are refreshed every 0.2 s. Each pass filtered the whole
catalogue to the stars within the label radius, sorted them by magnitude,
and turned every one into a label object, all to place at most fifteen.
At the opening view the radius holds about 60 000 stars, so each pass was a
55-70 ms task on the main thread. A CPU profile of the opening view, on a
Ryzen 7700X with an RTX 4080, counted 29 tasks over 50 ms in 6.7 s, one
every 230 ms; updateLabels took 23% of the main thread. That is the stutter
the frame-time bench measured on every GPU and every render budget.

The catalogue is now sorted by brightness once, when it loads.
brightestWithin walks that order and hands stars over lazily, and
spreadLabels already stopped once it had placed fifteen labels, so a pass
reads only the stars it looks at. The output is the same as before: the
same stars, in the same order, with ties in catalogue order, the selected
star named wherever it is, and a star exactly on the radius included. The
spec checks it against the filter-then-sort it replaces. Stars are no longer
scanned at all when the view is at galactic scale, where the result was
thrown away.

Profiled again on the same view: 0 tasks over 50 ms, and the scene's
per-frame work over the window dropped from 2 028 ms to 342 ms.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-16 13:52:51 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 efe6667b00 Route with A* over numeric cell keys, so a route can reach past the Sun's crowd
The route search widened evenly from the departure, Dijkstra-style, with a
budget of 20 000 stars. On the Gaia catalogue those are all within about
40 pc of the Sun, so it found no route to anything farther at any range:
Sol to Mirfak (155 pc) failed at 3, 8, 15 and 30 pc alike. Every failure
then asked minimumRangeBetween what range would work. That search widened
the same way with a 30 pc ceiling, and it ran for up to a minute on the
main thread before giving up with nothing.

routeBetween is now an A* search. Each star is queued by the distance
travelled to it plus the straight line on to the destination, on a binary
heap rather than a linear scan of the frontier. It heads for the
destination instead of flooding the core around the departure.

minimumRangeBetween bisects the range, one routeBetween per step, because
whether a chain exists can only become truer as the range grows. Its
answer is always the longest hop of a route actually found, so a range it
names always opens one. Its ceiling is now the Routes panel's own
maximum, MAX_JUMP_RANGE_PC: a range the control cannot be set to is no
answer, and raiseTo already clamped any figure above it.

The spatial index keys its cells by one number packed from their three
indices instead of an "ix,iy,iz" string. A search visits up to 125 cells
for every star it expands, and building those strings was half of what a
route cost. forEachWithin hands neighbours over unsorted and uncollected,
which was most of the other half; within is now that, gathered and sorted.

The no-route line said nothing in the catalogue bridged the gap; it now
says no chain of jumps up to the panel's maximum reaches the star, which
is what was searched.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-11 19:42:57 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 43b9b1f081 Give the map a scale bar, and rings that say how far from the Sun
The map had one way to read a distance: the Range readout, a number for how
far back the camera is. The local grid's five rings sat at 50 to 250 pc,
fixed and unlabelled. They said nothing from inside a 2 pc hop, and nothing
past 250 pc now that the Hipparcos stars Gaia places there are drawn.

A scale bar now sits under the scale rail. It shows the longest round length
(1, 2 or 5 x 10^n) that fits in 120 px, in AU inside a system and in parsecs
or kiloparsecs outside. It is measured at the depth the view is centred on,
since under perspective every depth has its own scale; under the plan view
it is exact everywhere.

The local grid's rings are now distances from the Sun, at a round step of
about a fifth of the camera's distance and out past the camera: 50 to 350 pc
from the opening view, 2 to 20 pc from twenty parsecs out. Each ring is
labelled with its distance, on the side facing what the view is centred on,
or across the far side of the grid when that is the Sun (the near side is
under the camera and out of frame). The survey edge at 250 pc stays called
out, as "Survey edge", whatever the step.

The rounding lives in one place, scale-bar.ts, shared by the bar and the
rings and tested there. Its formatter keeps three significant digits: one
digit, enough for the bar's round lengths, printed the 250 pc ring as
"300 pc".

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-11 19:26:39 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 4eb61ff58e Draw each HYG star at Gaia's distance, and keep the ones Hipparcos misplaced
HYG and Gaia were both cut at 250 pc, each on its own distance. A star
Hipparcos put at 200 pc and Gaia at 300 was kept by the first, never
downloaded from the second, and drawn at 200. That is where 83% of the
9 691 mid-magnitude HYG stars without a Gaia counterpart came from, and at
the median Hipparcos had them a third too close. The mirror case, Hipparcos
outside and Gaia inside, dropped the HYG row and left its Gaia entry
anonymous.

Gaia's own Hipparcos cross-match (hipparcos2_best_neighbour, a fixed DR3
table of 99 525 rows) gives a usable Gaia distance for 97 751 of them.
placementDistancePc keeps a star either survey puts inside the cutoff, and
draws every kept star at the better measurement, inside the cutoff or not.
57 121 HYG stars now sit at Gaia's distance. 6 833 of them are past 250 pc:
Zet Per 230 -> 259 pc, 35 Ori 137 -> 330, 44 Cnc 223 -> 613, and the
farthest, HIP 69445, at 8.7 kpc. 3 666 stars that Hipparcos put outside are
now kept, and 3 656 of them give a Gaia entry its name.

The cross-match is required rather than skipped when unreachable. Without
it, every one of those stars would move back to its Hipparcos distance, and
the published map would flip with the archive's availability. The ESA TAP
answered it with a 500 at first and in 102 s on the next try. So fetches
now retry 5xx and network failures twice, after 30 s and 120 s, in the
fetch every source goes through. The refresh job also carries the Gaia DR3
responses from run to run in the Actions cache: the release is frozen, and
a live re-fetch has already reproduced stars.bin byte for byte.

423 651 stars (+10), 61 168 HYG rows folded into Gaia entries (+3 656),
351 597 unnamed designations (-3 656). 10 886 HYG survivors and 23 unmerged
pairs under an arcsecond, both inside the merge gate's ceilings. The same
1 972 exoplanets have a host; KELT-4 A b and MWC 758 c now sit on their
named star.

The HUD's "Radius" becomes "Survey radius": 250 pc is where Gaia is
surveyed to, and no longer the edge of the map.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-11 19:07:12 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 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
2026-08-28 21:20:45 +02:00