Commit Graph
9 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
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 280159dcd2 Bring the figures the comments quote back to what the catalogue now holds
Later commits on this branch (0e9ab6f, ff744a0, 8c3a860, and this round's fold, positional lookup
and parallax fallback) changed counts that comments in build.ts, star-readouts.ts, star-catalog.ts
and fetchExoplanets.ts still quoted as "measured" or "today". Each is now the value measured on the
published catalogue after an ETL run from cache (decoded with decodeStarCatalog, or from the
validator log where it prints them):

- distances without a published error 439 -> 346, the Gliese ones 357 -> 264 (82 archive);
- parallax distances ranged 1 109 -> 1 116; HYG stars at Gaia's distance 8 129 -> 8 105, and the
  Gaia-placed stars HYG describes 62 002 -> 61 713 at Gaia's distance, 62 097 in all;
- HYG rows without a Gaia counterpart 11 554 -> 11 478: past 250 pc 8 307 (1 660 naked-eye), inside
  it 3 170 (1 204 brighter than V 8, 1 804 from 8 to 12, 162 fainter, 112 of them Gliese stars
  within 50 pc); the sentence also said those were every star past 250 pc, which the archive's
  hosts no longer let it be;
- planets with a host 6 327 -> 6 328, the 26 left having neither a distance nor a parallax;
- renamed hosts 575 -> 574; the composite table fills 100 of the 127 blank distances, not "the 100".

No ceiling or floor changes; comments only.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 17:46:00 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 f31ffe1425 Store a star's distance error in two bytes, so the card prints the error its catalogue published
a81dd49 kept the square root of the relative error in 255ths. A step was a few per cent of the
error itself, which moved the last digit the card prints: over the cached Gaia answers, 2 822 of
the 53 209 stars whose card prints an error printed another one than their published parallax
error gives (Gaia DR3 1415230383034813824 "112 +- 2 pc" for 3), and Rigel, 3.78 +- 0.34 mas in van
Leeuwen 2007, read "265 +- 23 pc" for 23.8.

The column is now a Uint16 in 65 535ths, placed before the photometry byte so its view stays
two-byte aligned whatever the star count; BYTES_PER_STAR_META goes from 16 to 17, the build.ts
round trip tolerance to half a 65 535th, and the README names the column. The same count gives 12,
each on a rounding half. In the running app Rigel reads "265 +- 24 pc".

The cost: stars-meta.bin goes from 7 288 512 to 7 744 044 bytes, and gzip -9 from 3 117 639 to
3 623 379, half a megabyte more to download, since the extra byte is noise-like. One reviewer
judged the one-byte figure within the errors' own accuracy; this takes the other two's view that
the card should print the published number.

Control: 255 steps again fails "keeps an error close enough that the card prints the published
one" alone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-30 17:43:54 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 23547defe0 Read an archive host's colour off the dwarf sequence at its temperature, and say it was not measured
For an archive-placed host with a temperature and no B magnitude, fetchExoplanets took B−V from
Ballesteros' blackbody fit, which runs 0.1 to 0.2 redder than Pecaut & Mamajek's dwarf sequence
below 3 800 K, and the luminosity then read its correction off that sequence at that colour: 3 500 K
came back as 3 102 K with a correction 1.15 magnitudes too large, anything under about 3 170 K was
clamped to B−V 2.00, and the card printed it as a measured "Colour B−V 2.00". CFBDSIR
J145829+101343, a 580 K brown dwarf, read "Spectral type ~M6, from colour".

temperatureToColorIndex now reads the table itself backwards, interpolating B−V between the two
types the temperature falls between, so the temperature and correction read back off the colour
are the table's at that temperature; it has no answer outside 2 420 to 31 400 K. The colour is
flagged colorFromTemperature, a fifth bit in the photometry byte (the format, README and the ETL's
round-trip check follow), and the card prints it "B−V 1.66, from its temperature", marked derived.

From cache: 57 archive stars change colour; 54 carry the flag and 3, CFBDSIR J145829+101343 among
them, now have none. For the 47 of them the archive gives a luminosity, the one derived from
magnitude and colour moves from a median 0.228 dex off it to 0.124; Kepler-445 (3 157 K) from
0.0282 L☉ to 0.0080 against the archive's 0.0079. Its colour goes from 2.00 to 1.67. The card shows
the archive's luminosity where it has one since earlier on this branch, so this is the figure used
for the rest and for their radii.

Controls, each failing its named test: the nearest hotter row taken without interpolating (2 of
803 failed), no refusal outside the table, the flag not encoded, and the card calling the colour
measured (1 of 803 each).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-29 21:29:09 +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 7a112e4bb3 Answer the review: HYG's own last-resort name is a designation too
Junie: a HYG star that fell all the way through the ETL's naming chain --
no proper name, Bayer, Flamsteed, HD, Gliese or HIP -- is called "HYG <id>",
and with `source: 'hyg'` the predicate was looking for a lower-case "hyg "
prefix and calling it named. None in the current catalogue, but the path is
in `tools/etl/fetchStars.ts` and a refresh could walk it.

Fixed in the table rather than in the predicate: `hyg: 'HYG'` next to
`gaia: 'Gaia DR3'`, so the encoder, the decoder and the predicate all read the
one rule. The sourceless case reads the same entry instead of repeating it.

npm test 609/609, build and ETL typecheck clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
2026-08-27 20:16:11 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 f14e252b19 Name the neighbours that have a name, before the ones that only have a number
The neighbour ring exists to say where you are. Since the catalogue refresh it
has been spending one of its four places in Sol on "Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696"
-- a nineteen-digit survey id for the star printed beside it as Proxima
Centauri, the same star twice -- and that duplicate row pushed Barnard's Star
off the ring altogether. 91.9% of the refreshed catalogue is named that way.

Named stars now come first, and survey designations fill in only where fewer
than four named ones are in reach. The line between the two is the one the
catalogue format already draws: a name is a designation when it is what the
star's source would generate for it. Judged by the prefix rather than by
rebuilding "prefix id" from the row, because the number after "Gaia DR3" is the
survey's own id, which the 32-bit row id cannot hold -- a round trip through
the id would have called every one of those stars named.

The preference lives on the index as `nearestPreferring`: the preferred pass
exhausts the search before the fill runs, so a named star is never outranked by
a nearer unnamed one. That is the whole point of asking.

The end-to-end spec names Barnard's Star again, on purpose. The four nearest
named stars to the Sun are a fact about space, not about which catalogue was
refreshed last, and without this change that is exactly the label that
vanished -- checked by running the spec with the preference stashed: it fails
on that line, and passes with it back.

npm test 609/609, npx playwright test 16/16 under CI=true --workers=2.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
2026-08-27 20:06:04 +02:00
Claude efa9e4084a Draw the whole catalogue, and build the aggregation the rest would need
Two things, one verified and one that cannot be.

The render budget is now the whole catalogue: 68388 stars, one instanced
draw call, which is what a GPU should be asked to do. The budget itself
stays, because the catalogue is meant to grow past what any machine should
draw at once — Gaia alone could contribute a million — and at that point
the selection is what keeps the field legible rather than a grey wash. A
`?stars=` override handles the machines that cannot, including the
software rasterizer the end-to-end suite runs against, whose frame rate is
two orders of magnitude below a real GPU's and which was measuring the
rasterizer rather than the app.

The aggregation is the second thing, and none of it has run. Every ESA,
NOIRLab, SDSS and Euclid endpoint is unreachable from here — only GitHub
raw is, which is why HYG and OpenNGC are the current sources. So this is
infrastructure and a Gaia query written against the published DR3 schema,
not data.

What the framework encodes is that these surveys are not interchangeable.
The distinction is not size but whether a catalogue knows how far away its
objects are, because a 3D map cannot place a star it only has a direction
for. Gaia is the only one of the five that can add stars here, because it
is the only one that measures parallaxes. DECaPS2 has fifty times Gaia's
object count and photometry alone — not one of its 3.32 billion objects
can be placed in depth. Euclid's bulge is 8 kpc away, where a parallax is
microarcseconds; its contribution would be imagery. SDSS-V and SAGA are
keyed to stars something else already places, so they enrich rather than
extend. Those roles are recorded as data the ETL prints, not as prose that
can drift.

Overlapping catalogues are reconciled on direction rather than on 3D
proximity, which is the one non-obvious part. Two surveys agree on a
star's direction to within an arcsecond and disagree on its distance by
tens of per cent, so a star at 200 pc is 50 pc from itself between
catalogues while being unmistakably the same object. Matching in 3D would
need a tolerance so loose it swallowed real neighbours. The better
parallax wins where both reach; where only one does, the star stays.

Names become dense-with-holes with a source dictionary, because a survey
catalogue has no proper names — writing "Gaia DR3 4472832130942575872"
once per star would cost 25 MB per million to repeat what two adjacent
fields already say. An empty entry costs three bytes and is regenerated on
load. The Sun needed its own case in the merge: it sits at the origin, has
no direction to compare, and appears in every catalogue.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 08:51:54 +00:00
Claude 29fd92d118 Widen the star catalogue, and separate what is drawn from what is known
The map held 8750 stars within 50 pc and rendered 371 systems. Both were
lower than they needed to be, for different reasons.

The star catalogue was capped by its own encoding as much as by the
cutoff: one JSON object per star, eight key names repeated each time, 157
bytes a star. At the range HYG actually reaches that is 17 MB to download
and parse before the first frame. So the numbers move into two binary
column stores — positions in stars.bin, which the GPU is handed verbatim,
and id/magnitude/colour/spectral index in stars-meta.bin — and the JSON
keeps only the strings, with 2600 distinct spectral classifications
collapsed to a dictionary. The layout is defined once, in star-catalog.ts,
and the ETL and the app both use it, so the writer and the reader cannot
drift.

The cutoff then goes to 250 pc: 68388 stars, 7.8x as many for 1.7x the
bytes. That is where HYG's measurements stop rather than a round number —
98.6% of its rows are Hipparcos, whose parallaxes are good to about a
milliarcsecond, so beyond 250 pc it would be plotting noise.

Drawing all of them is a separate question from knowing them, and it is
answered separately. The field draws a budget: every star inside 25 pc,
because the nearest are faint red dwarfs and Proxima Centauri is magnitude
11, then the brightest of everything beyond. Search, navigation and the
planet cross-reference still see the whole catalogue. A real GPU would
draw all 68388 without noticing; the budget is for the machines that would
not, and it is one constant.

Systems were limited by something else entirely. The archive data already
shipped named 4735 host stars and only 388 resolved, because the rest lay
outside a 50 pc catalogue — and the cross-reference kept only its own
result, so redoing it meant re-downloading an archive that is not
reachable from here. Host coordinates are now stored with each planet, and
the match is re-resolved at build time against whatever catalogue the run
produced. Even name matching alone, which needs no coordinates and so
works on the records already shipped, rescues 335 planets across 238
systems: 371 renderable systems become 609.

Two selection rules were tuned for a 50 pc bubble and no longer fit.
Tethers followed the Sun's nearest neighbours, which are a speck at this
range, and now follow the brightest; labels were ranked by proximity,
which named whatever sat nearest the middle of the screen, and are now
ranked by brightness — so the view names Canopus, Achernar and Spica
rather than a clump of catalogue designations.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 08:35:41 +00:00