Commit Graph
45 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
github-actions[bot] 46cb923849 Refresh the astronomical catalogues
Scheduled re-run of the ETL against the live archives. Gated on the unit suite and a production build in this same run, because a GITHUB_TOKEN push triggers no CI of its own.
2026-08-24 06:05:56 +00:00
Senrokai 9ae87e83fb Restyle the HUD as an observatory instrument (#4)
Restyle the HUD as an observatory instrument
2026-08-17 18:17:18 +02:00
Claude 650b3b37a0 Fix what the review confirmed: anchoring, overlap, honesty, one voice
Fourteen findings from an adversarial review pass, applied together because
most share two roots — geometry written against assumptions the renderer does
not hold, and a design language spelled out longhand until it drifted.

Correctness. The leader line pointed at empty space: CSS2DObject centres a
label on its anchor by default, and margin only nudges the centred box — the
overlay now anchors the left edge (center 0, 0.5) so the hairline meets the
star. The info panel and not-found panel returned to top-4 at sm, under a
search field that is 26rem wide and centred, covering the back button on
every viewport from 640 to 1088px; they now wait for xl. The search empty
state asserted "nothing matches" while the catalogues were still loading —
and forever if they failed — so it now waits for the index. "Matches 8" was
the page size wearing the costume of a count; the header now reports the
real total, with the cap stated when it bites. The nameplate un-hides at lg
instead of sm, clear of the rail and the object card. theme-color matches
the void again.

Accessibility. Tabbing to search changed one hairline's hue; the wrapper now
carries the old ring as a visible focus indicator.

Structure. hud-surface names the panel recipe that had been inlined at seven
sites and had already forked into /85 and /92; the backdrop blur it carried
is gone from every near-opaque panel — the canvas beneath redraws every
frame, so each blur was re-sampled continuously for an effect the fill hid —
and survives only as blur-sm on the genuinely translucent search shell.
type-label and type-eyebrow name the two label voices, retiring 0.14em and
the stray hover:bg-accent/10. The Measured/Derived rows both cards pasted
twice each live once in ReadoutSectionsComponent; the reticle and chevron
each draw from a single geometry, the reticle's stroke held in screen pixels
so one mark serves every size. The acquire wipe plays once per search, not
once per keystroke, because both outcomes now share one panel. hud-banner,
which styled nothing since the rule was deleted, is a data-testid — the
convention its own file already used.

527 unit tests, 6/6 end-to-end, production build, and a driven screenshot:
every label now hangs off its star with the hairline touching the point.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-17 15:19:53 +00:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 0dcd49c777 Merge main again: readouts built once, said in the instrument's voice
Main moved while the previous merge was being verified. It brought the
shared bodyReadouts builder — one source for a body's measured and derived
rows, used by the detail page and the system view's new object card — plus
the derived-value asterisk in the HUD readout panel.

All of that data flow is kept. The templates it arrived in are restyled to
this branch's idiom: the info panel and the object card share the same
organism (header, full-bleed readout rows, provenance line, route rail),
the object card's route rail sits at the bottom because there the route is
the next step rather than the way back, and the derived asterisk and its
footnote keep their meaning in sentence case. The card also needed the
restyle to render at all — it arrived wearing hud-panel, a class the
observatory system no longer defines.

Verified: build clean, 527/527 unit, 6/6 e2e, design detector clean.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-17 16:16:50 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 a965aed1db Merge main, carrying the observatory instrument onto its rebuilt chrome
Two HUD redesigns happened in parallel: this branch restyled the old chrome
as a precision observatory instrument, while main rebuilt the chrome against
screenshots of the Star Citizen starmap — a scale ladder, a nameplate, a
readout panel, and two-line labels that say what a thing is, not just what
it is called.

This merge keeps everything main's rebuild learned and says it in this
branch's voice. Kept: the ladder's reachability semantics and test hooks,
the two-line name/kind labels and their shared declutter logic, system-view
body labels, every readout. Restyled: chamfered clip-path panels become
hairline frames with corner-tick brackets; Orbitron is gone and one readout
face carries the hierarchy; the hexagon reticle becomes the same
circle-and-ticks mark the search field wears; focus states move to real
focus-visible outlines; the long uppercase caveat notes drop to sentence
case so they read as sentences.

Two merge-borne fixes along the way: the labels' translate offset moved into
.map-label as a margin (CSS2DRenderer rewrites the inline transform every
frame, the margin is the offset it cannot touch), and the info panel's new
Derived section picked up the horizontal padding it lost when the panel
moved to per-block padding.

Verified: build clean, 496/496 unit, 6/6 e2e (on a free port — 4300 is
occupied on this machine), design detector clean, screenshots reviewed at
1440x900 and 390x844 across all four views plus search states.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-17 16:09:33 +02:00
Claude 8e55964b14 Refresh the catalogues on a schedule, and republish when they change
Mondays 05:23 UTC: re-run the ETL cold against the live archives, and if the
output differs by a byte, gate it on the unit suite and a production build,
commit it to main, and dispatch the Pages deploy. If nothing changed, say so
in the run summary and touch nothing.

The gates run inside this workflow because they cannot run after it: a push
made with GITHUB_TOKEN fires no push workflows at all — GitHub's recursion
guard — so an unguarded push would deploy nothing and be checked by nothing.
The same guard is why the deploy and a visible CI record are dispatched
explicitly afterwards; dispatch events do go through where push events do
not. ci.yml gains a workflow_dispatch trigger for exactly that call.

Also corrects pages.yml's claim that configure-pages enables Pages on first
run. It cannot: the action's `enablement` input requires an admin-scoped
token, which GITHUB_TOKEN is not. If the site has never been enabled, the
first deploy fails at that step and the one-time fix is Settings → Pages →
Source: GitHub Actions.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-17 14:05:42 +00:00
Claude 9a5e41495b Make a cold-cache ETL run a pure function of the archives
Two order dependencies surfaced while designing the scheduled refresh, both
invisible on a developer machine with a warm cache and both guaranteed to
haunt a weekly CI run that starts cold.

The Exoplanet Archive query had no ORDER BY, so the archive was free to
return rows in any order it liked — and exoplanets.json preserves row order,
so a re-run could rewrite the file, and commit a diff, when nothing was
actually published. Ordered by pl_name, which is unique among default_flag=1
rows, so the order is total.

The deep-sky sort tie-broke with localeCompare, whose collation belongs to
the ICU build of whichever Node runs the ETL. Compared code points instead:
the file must not reorder because the runner's ICU disagrees with the machine
that wrote it last.

Both may reorder the committed files once, on the next real refresh. After
that, byte-identity between runs means what it should: the archives
published nothing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-17 14:05:41 +00:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 836816ffbd Restyle the HUD as an observatory instrument
Replaces the generic rounded dark cards floating over the scene with a
single instrument language: hairline frames cut by accent corner ticks, a
viewport frame that reads the whole screen as one panel, and readouts whose
figures are what the eye lands on.

- styles.css: retune the tokens (deeper void/panel, brighter text/muted so
  every label clears 4.5:1 even over the brightest part of the skybox) and
  add two utilities — `hud-brackets` draws the four corner ticks from eight
  background gradients so no panel pays for them in DOM, `hud-acquire` wipes
  a panel down on mount as its one authored moment (reduced-motion aware).
- Drop Orbitron: every string in this UI is a measurement, an identifier, or
  a catalog label, so one readout face carries the hierarchy through weight,
  size, and tracking — and the HUD paints one font request sooner.
- Search: reticle mark instead of a magnifier, transparent field inside a
  framed shell, results as a dense two-column list with a match count, and
  the previously missing empty state.
- Info panel: return rail, name/class header, and a readout table with
  tabular figures and the unit tinted back off the number.
- Star labels: a hairline leader back to the star they name. The offset moved
  from `translate-*` to a margin because CSS2DRenderer overwrites the inline
  transform every frame, which silently beat the old classes.
- Both top-anchored overlays drop below the search field under `sm` so they
  no longer stack on top of it on a phone, and focus moved from a removed
  outline plus ring to real `focus-visible` outlines.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-07 17:42:14 +02:00
Claude 7d07921d69 Say what the project is, in the two places people arrive
The README opened without mentioning that the thing is deployed, and the HTML
document carried a title and nothing else — no description, no link preview.
Both matter more now that there is a public URL to land on.

README: the live link up top; the object card and the measured/derived split
from #3, which were built but never written down; `shared/format/`, `public/`
and `.github/workflows/` in the layout.

index.html: a description, a theme colour matching --color-void so the browser
chrome does not flash white around a black sky, and Open Graph/Twitter tags so
a shared link renders as something other than a bare URL. Those URLs are
absolute and name the deployment outright — a scraper has no document to
resolve a relative path against, so they cannot follow <base> the way the rest
of the app's paths do. A custom domain later means editing these three lines.

The preview image is the galactic view, copied into `public/` so it is served
by the site itself rather than linked out to raw.githubusercontent.

Verified: the built document keeps every tag, the base href still rewrites to
/star-map/, the image answers 200 at the path the og:image names, and both the
root and a deep link still render. 527 tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-07 14:22:29 +00:00
Claude 433bcca8a2 Stop publishing the repo as a plugin marketplace, and refresh the run skill
Three small things.

Removed `.claude-plugin/marketplace.json`. It is the file `/plugin
marketplace add` reads, so without it this repo no longer offers itself as a
marketplace — which is the odd part of an Angular app carrying one. The
caveman plugin's own files stay, so it can be listed from a marketplace of its
own later; only the listing is gone.

That left four documents asserting an install path that no longer exists,
including a README section handing out `/plugin marketplace add` and
`/plugin install` commands that would now fail. All four now say what is
actually true. `.junie/plans/nasa-star-map.md` still describes the repo as
containing only a marketplace, and is left alone: it records what was here
before the app was written, and is not a claim about the present.

The run skill's numbers had drifted a release behind — 496 tests in 28 files
against a real 527 in 31, and a build timed at 9s that now takes 12. Measured
rather than guessed. The pinned Playwright version it names was correct.

It also gains the Pages build, which is not a plain `npm run build`: the base
href and the 404.html copy are both required for a project site, and the
artifact root is `dist/star-map/browser` rather than its parent. Plus the
matching gotcha, since a Pages build served at `/` looks broken in a way that
tells you nothing about whether it would work.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-07 14:02:12 +00:00
Claude cca652d71f Publish the map to GitHub Pages
Builds on a push to main and deploys the result, so the thing is reachable
without checking it out and running a dev server.

Two details a project site needs that a root deployment does not:

The base href is set from the repository name at build time. The app is served
from a subdirectory there, and `DataLoaderService` fetches its catalogues with
relative URLs — those resolve against `<base>` rather than the current path, so
without it a deep link would ask for /body/assets/data/stars.bin.

Pages serves a static tree with no rewrite rules, so /body/mars has no file
behind it and returns 404. Answering that 404 with the app lets the router
render the route. The status stays 404, which crawlers will notice and readers
will not; the alternative is hash URLs, which everyone notices.

Verified against a server that mimics both behaviours: the root loads the star
field with all six catalogue assets at 200, and /body/mars boots through
404.html and renders Mars at 3,390 km with its assets still resolving.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-07 13:22:01 +00:00
Claude cfad718b0a Check develop after a merge, not just main
`develop` became the integration branch when #3 merged into it, but CI's push
trigger still named only `main` — so the merge commit itself ran nothing. A
pull request is checked before the merge, not after, which leaves the state of
the branch people actually build from unverified whenever two green pull
requests conflict semantically.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-07 12:46:14 +00:00
Senrokai ca89724b88 Say what is known about a world, and how it is known (#3)
Fills the gaps in the HUD and the body cards, distinguishes measured
quantities from derived ones, raises an object card over the live system view
instead of navigating away from it, and adds a Junie code-review workflow
beside CI.

Five commits kept separate: the feature, the review follow-up collapsing
bodyReadouts, a doc-comment fix, the review workflow, and the fix that stops
that workflow failing a pull request when no API key is set.
2026-08-07 14:26:37 +02:00
Claude 4d5e3a9914 Let the Junie review skip rather than fail without a key
The workflow as written failed on ddf805e: with no JUNIE_API_KEY secret the
input expands to empty and the action exits on "Missing required input",
marking the pull request failed for a reason that has nothing to do with its
code. I called it inert without the key. It was not inert; it was red, and it
would have been red on every pull request until someone added the secret.

So gate the steps on the key's presence and write the reason into the run
summary instead. `secrets` is not a context a step's `if` can read and neither
`secrets` nor `env` is available to a job-level `if`, so the presence is
resolved once into a job-level env var, which steps can read.

The action step also gets continue-on-error: an outage or a rate limit at
JetBrains' end is worth seeing in the log, but this workflow is meant to be an
opinion beside CI rather than a gate in front of it, and a failure to obtain
that opinion should not hold a pull request whose tests pass.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-07 11:33:49 +00:00
Claude ddf805e61f Have Junie review each pull request
CI says whether the code works. Nothing says whether it reads well, and the
one review this repository has had so far arrived by hand.

Kept as a separate workflow rather than a third job in ci.yml so a review can
never turn the build red — the two answer different questions and should be
able to disagree.

It skips drafts, and skips pull requests from forks: GitHub withholds secrets
from `pull_request` runs on a forked head, so the job would fail on a missing
JUNIE_API_KEY rather than say anything about the code. Each push supersedes
the previous review rather than stacking another comment beside it.

Requires a JUNIE_API_KEY repository secret, generated at
junie.jetbrains.com/cli. Without it the workflow is inert.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-07 11:31:53 +00:00
Claude b14ce78c5f Say what formatRadiusKm actually returns
Its doc comment promised a fallback to Earth radii that the function has never had.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-06 03:57:40 +00:00
Claude 7b0f32f71a Assemble a body's readouts once, not once per panel
Follow-up to review on #3. The card and the detail page each built their own Measured/Derived
split, kind label and provenance sentence — the drift buildBodyViewModel exists to prevent,
re-forked one layer up, and the drift would have been in which side of the measured/derived line
a quantity falls on, which is the distinction those panels exist to draw. One bodyReadouts(body)
now returns both blocks and the sentence, and both templates iterate it. The two surfaces render
identical rows as a result, and the card gains the inclination the detail page already showed.

Also from that review:

- KIND_LABELS was duplicated between the two panels; it now lives beside bodyReadouts. The third
  copy the review pointed at is a different union (search results are star/body/exoplanet, and
  label a body "Body"), so it stays where it is.
- CardRow was HudReadout renamed. Both are now Readout, which HudReadout extends with its
  derived flag.
- The enterable-systems count was a 21-line lazy memo over arrays that are already in hand; it is
  one expression where those arrays are assigned.
- buildBodyViewModel now carries hostStarId, so the detail scene stops rescanning both catalogues
  for something the builder had already resolved.
- heliocentricPeriodDays was called twice for the same body.
- The superscript helper was a split/map/join; it is a replace.
- info-panel had five computed() each wrapping one pure call with a non-null assertion, beside a
  template that inlined the same kind of call directly. They are gone with the shared readouts.
- Dropped a tautological test that compared a pure function to itself. Replaced with one that
  asserts the host star id the builder now carries.
- Removed the orphaned doc comment left behind when formatParsecs/formatAu moved out.

And one the review raised as out of scope but is worth taking: formatRadiusKm grouped thousands
above its decimal threshold and not below it, so 69,911 km sat beside a bare 6371 km. Both are
grouped now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-06 03:52:11 +00:00
Claude 1019727a39 Say what is known about a world, and how it is known
Four changes to the readout panel and the body cards, which between them were showing less than
the catalogues hold and not always distinguishing a measurement from an inference.

Picking a planet used to navigate straight to /body/:id. That tore down the system scene and the
camera with it, so comparing two planets meant flying back into the system between each. Hovering
a body now raises a card over the live view and clicking pins it; Full view still opens the route
for the full 3D inspection. Clicking empty space unpins, and leaving the system clears it.

The card and the detail page were assembling "what do we know about this world" independently,
which is the shape of bug where a planet reads 255 K in one panel and 254 K in the other. Both now
build from one shared view model.

Orbital period was absent everywhere. For a heliocentric orbit it follows exactly from the
semi-major axis, because in these units the Sun's mass is the unit of mass — Mars comes back
687.0 d against a published 686.98. It is deliberately not computed for moons, whose elements are
relative to a parent planet the catalogue has no mass for, nor for exoplanets: periodDays is
populated for none of the 6319 shipped records and hostStarMassSolar for none either, so any
figure would assume a solar-mass host and mis-state every planet around an M dwarf. Where a period
does exist it is filed under Measured or Derived according to which it is, not by its field name.

The system readout showed a flat 0.00 pc for the Sun's distance, which is arithmetically right and
reads as a bug — the distance from here to here is not a measurement, so it is suppressed. It
gains the host star's luminosity, marked as derived, and counts moons separately from planets. The
neighbourhood readout gains the one thing the star field cannot show: how many of those points can
actually be entered. Derived readouts carry a marker and a footnote saying so.

Every quantity now formats through one module whose precision follows magnitude, rather than a
fixed decimal count per call site that read as false precision at one end and lost real
information at the other: 0.0026 AU stays legible instead of rounding to 0.00, and Pluto's period
reads 248 yr rather than 90560 d.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 16:45:17 +00:00
Senrokai 60b3726a84 Merge pull request #2 from avalon-vanguard/claude/project-development-ehm7mw
Give the repository a way to actually run itself
2026-08-05 17:53:21 +02:00
Claude c5ec752961 Give the repository a way to actually run itself
Nothing in the repo explains how to launch this app in a headless container, and three separate
things stop it from starting — none of them discoverable without hitting each in turn.

The container's default node is v22.22.2, one patch below the floor `engines` declares. A
satisfying build sits at /opt/node (v22.23.2), but PATH finds /opt/node22 first, and the names
invert what you would guess. `ng serve` reports only the version and exits.

The pinned Playwright wants a Chromium revision this image does not carry, under a directory
layout the older build does not use, so `npm run e2e` cannot launch a browser at all until the
expected path is shimmed. Downloads are blocked, so `playwright install` is not the answer.

And the scene is software-rasterized here: entering a system takes a camera flight that has to be
waited on rather than slept through, a single canvas click lands before picking is wired, and a
screenshot taken the moment a DOM assertion passes catches a half-drawn frame.

driver.mjs handles all of it — picks a node satisfying `engines`, owns the dev server, drives the
camera to each scale, and either screenshots or dumps the HUD's labels as JSON for checking a
change without eyeballing a picture. SKILL.md documents only commands that were run here, and
records the traps in Gotchas, including that no `pkill -f` is safe for stopping the server: it
matches your own command line and kills the shell.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 15:45:03 +00:00
Senrokai bf7ca0da5b Merge pull request #1 from avalon-vanguard/claude/project-development-ehm7mw
Galactic scale, derived surfaces, a 68 388-star catalogue, and CI
2026-08-05 16:44:51 +02:00
Claude 748cb8927e Rebuild the map chrome against the Star Citizen starmap
Until now this was built from memory — the reference site is blocked by this
environment's egress policy, so the resemblance was asserted rather than
checked. Five screenshots of the real thing arrived, and this is what
comparing against them changed.

Labels say what a thing is, not just what it is called. Every label is now
two lines: the name, then its type in smaller, wider-tracked, dimmer
capitals. This is the single most characteristic element of the reference
and it appears in every frame of it. It also settles a real ambiguity — in a
map that mixes scales, "Orion" is an arm, a nebula and a constellation, and
nothing about a bare name said which one a label pointed at.

For stars the type line distinguishes "System" from "Star", which is the one
thing it can say that the map could not otherwise show: which points are
somewhere you can actually go.

The system view had no body labels at all, where the reference labels every
planet. It does now, which turned out to need two supporting changes. The
overlay had only ever added and removed labels, never moved them, because
stars do not move; planets do, so an existing label is now repositioned
rather than left where the body used to be. And the inner four planets
printed on top of each other in exactly the clump the star labels were
already spread to avoid — so that logic is now shared rather than
duplicated, with system bodies ordered outermost-first. Closing in reverses
it by itself: the outer orbits leave the frame, their labels drop, and the
inner planets take the space.

The chrome follows the reference's layout. The scale ladder is a row of
chamfered tabs at the top left rather than a vertical list of diamonds at
the middle left, and a nameplate across the top centre says what the view is
holding. The centre reticle is a hexagon, which is how the reference locks
onto a body, and stays distinct from the rectangular panel chrome.

Not copied: the ARK/RSI logos, wordmarks, and the bottom-right tool tabs.
The first two are someone else's brand, and the third would be four tabs
opening features this app does not have.

Two e2e assertions moved off bare text matches onto the readout panel's own
title. The nameplate names the same thing the panel does, so "is 'Local
Stars' on screen" became ambiguous — the assertion, not the design, was what
had to give.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 10:50:07 +00:00
Claude 39e7f29086 Declare the Node versions this project actually needs
Angular 22 requires Node ^22.22.3 || ^24.15.0 || >=26.0.0, and package.json
said nothing about it. On a machine half a patch below that floor — 22.22.2,
which is what this development container has on PATH — every `ng` command
refuses to start, so `npm test` and `npm run build` fail with a version
error rather than a test failure. Nothing in the repository pointed at the
cause; you had to already know.

The range is Angular's, taken verbatim rather than guessed at, because it is
the binding constraint. Every other direct dependency is looser and fully
contained by it: vitest wants ^20 || ^22 || >=24, jsdom ^20.19 || ^22.12 ||
>=24, tsx >=18, typescript >=14.17, Playwright >=20.

This moves the complaint earlier and makes it name the project. `npm ci` now
prints EBADENGINE for star-map itself before anything is installed, instead
of the first Angular command failing several steps later. It stays a warning
rather than an error — turning it into one needs engine-strict in .npmrc,
which would hard-fail installs on any unlisted version, and that is a
stricter policy than this change is claiming to make.

The lockfile carries the field too: npm mirrors the root package's engines
into it, and a lockfile that disagrees with package.json is one npm has to
resolve rather than trust. Regenerated with --package-lock-only, which
changed those three lines and no dependency.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 10:06:05 +00:00
Claude 2e67c3ea9a Commit the lockfile, and give the repository CI
Nothing has ever checked this project automatically. There are no workflows,
so the pull request's green tick means only that the checks were run by hand
on one machine, and nothing would catch a regression pushed later.

The lockfile had to come first. `npm ci` is the only install that guarantees
CI tests the dependency tree that is actually committed, and it refuses to
run without package-lock.json — which was gitignored. Un-ignoring it also
pins the 617 packages this was built and verified against; without it, a
transitive release could change what CI runs from one day to the next with
no commit to point at. Checked before committing: every entry resolves to
registry.npmjs.org, and it carries no credentials.

Two jobs rather than one, run in parallel. The typecheck/unit/build job is
fast and deterministic; the end-to-end job drives a real headless browser
through WebGL2 software rendering and is the one that will be slow and, if
anything here is going to be flaky, flaky. Keeping them apart means a
browser timeout cannot hide a failing unit test behind it.

Between the four steps, all four TypeScript projects are compiled: the ETL
and end-to-end configs explicitly, since nothing else ever builds them, and
the spec and app configs by `ng test` and `ng build` respectively.

One thing this cannot verify from here: the runner installs Chromium to
match the pinned Playwright, where this container ships an older build. The
suite was run locally against that older browser instead, and passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 09:57:21 +00:00
Claude 8191254b3c Put the four views in the README, and correct what one of them showed
The README described the app without showing it. Adds a screenshot to each
of the four sections it describes, captured from a real run at the current
state of the code rather than assembled or touched up.

Capturing them caught a claim that had gone stale. The galactic view's
readout still said everything inside 50 pc was real, which was true when
that string was written and has been wrong since the catalogue reached
250 pc. It now quotes the catalogue's own size and reach, so it cannot
drift again — and, usefully, that makes a stale screenshot self-evident:
the numbers are in the picture.

JPEG rather than PNG, at 1.1 MB for all four instead of about five. These
are dark scenes with fine gradients, where JPEG can band, so they were
checked at quality 88 rather than assumed to be fine.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 09:35:19 +00:00
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
Claude 029162ff52 Lower the star halo floor so the inner orbits stay legible
The floor that stopped the Sun disappearing reached past Venus and up to
Earth, covering the two orbits it most needed to leave alone.

Halved, from 3.5% of the framed radius to 2%. The halo's visual radius is
half its extent, so that puts its edge at 1% of the framed radius, and the
orbits it has to clear sit at their own fraction of the same radius: in
the solar system, framed to hold Pluto, Venus is at 1.3% and Earth at
1.8%. Both are now outside it, and the star still reads at about nine
pixels across on a typical window.

Mercury, at 0.7%, is still inside — and would be at any halo large enough
to see, since its orbit is only three pixels wide at that range. That is
now a pinned test rather than an oversight.

The floor was only ever the lower bound; the tests now state the upper one
too, in the terms the trade is actually made in — pixels on screen for
visibility, AU against real orbits for clearance.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 08:01:19 +00:00
Claude be19d9cbcc Keep the star visible at the distance that frames its system
Framing the whole system pushed the camera far enough back that the star
at the centre became a speck — about a pixel across for the Sun.

The cause is a constraint that cannot be tuned away. A star is sized
against its system's innermost orbit, because it must never swallow its
closest planet, while the camera is placed to frame the outermost ring.
In the solar system those differ by a factor of a hundred: at the distance
that fits Pluto in view, a disc that stays clear of Mercury is a pixel
across. No radius satisfies both, because the information genuinely does
not fit on one screen at that zoom.

So the disc stays honest to the orbits and the halo carries the
visibility. Light is not a surface: a glow that reaches past the innermost
orbit says the star is bright, not that it is large. Its extent is still a
multiple of the star — so a compact system keeps exactly the corona it had
— but floored against the framed radius, which is what the wide systems
needed.

The disc grows a little too: it may now reach 45% of the innermost orbit
rather than 35%, which still leaves clear space between the star's limb
and the closest orbit.

Also makes createGlowSprite take the extent it will draw rather than a
radius and a multiplier. The two were only ever multiplied together, and
how large a star's halo should be is not a property of the star — it
depends on how its system is framed, which is a decision that belongs with
the framing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 07:40:10 +00:00
Claude 6019987fc4 Frame the system view from the camera it actually has
The grid overflowed the frame in 368 of the 371 systems the datasets
contain — median fill 1.11, and the outermost ring cut off by the viewport
edge in almost every one.

Two compounding causes. The framing distance was a fixed multiple of the
outermost orbit, tuned by eye against a 55-degree field of view; the
engine's camera is 50. And it framed the outermost *orbit*, while the
widest thing actually drawn is the grid's outer ring, which by
construction always sits beyond it.

Neither is fixable by adjusting the multiple, because a multiple is the
wrong shape of answer: what has to fit is a radius on screen, and how much
radius a given distance buys depends entirely on the lens. So the distance
now comes from the camera's own vertical field of view and aspect —
picking whichever screen axis is the tighter one, so a portrait window
backs off further rather than clipping — applied to the grid's outer ring
with an explicit margin around it.

The ceiling goes up with it. Eighty AU could not frame the solar system
out to Pluto once the real field of view was accounted for; that needs 120
on a landscape display and 140 on a portrait one. Only companions hundreds
of AU out reach the new ceiling, and those still arrive framed on their
inner region.

Measured across every system in the data, at three window shapes: the
overflow count drops from 368 to 2, the fill settles at exactly 0.89 —
the margin, uniformly — and the outer ring still encloses the outermost
orbit everywhere, so neither invariant was traded for the other.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 07:30:02 +00:00
Claude ac296f5133 Derive a surface for every body that was never photographed
Fifteen bodies here have a real photograph. Every exoplanet does not, and
never will on current instruments — none has ever been imaged — and nor do
several of the solar system's own moons. Those all shared one crude
stand-in: a few noisy bands tinted by category, cached per colour, so
every exoplanet in the app was literally the same picture.

They now get a surface reasoned from what has actually been measured.

The chain is standard at every link. A host star's luminosity comes from
its catalogued apparent magnitude and its parallax distance — that pair is
exactly an absolute magnitude — plus a bolometric correction for its
spectral class. The correction is not optional: an M dwarf radiates most
of its light in the infrared, so its visual magnitude understates it more
than tenfold, and M dwarfs are what most nearby planet hosts are.
Luminosity and the semi-major axis then give an equilibrium temperature,
mass and radius give a bulk density, and size, temperature and density
together give a class of world.

Checked against the solar system the temperatures land on Earth 255 K,
Jupiter 112 K, Neptune 46 K, all within a kelvin or two of published
values, and 51 Pegasi b comes out at 1227 K against a published 1200.

Each class carries a palette reasoned from its chemistry — methane absorbs
red light, which is why the ice giants are blue — and a structure: zonal
bands for a body with a fluid envelope, because a rapidly rotating
atmosphere organises into them, and fractal terrain for one with a solid
surface. Polar caps grow and shrink with the derived temperature, which is
the clearest visible consequence of the whole chain.

The generator samples three-dimensional noise along the sphere rather than
a flat field, so there is no seam to stitch at the antimeridian and no
pinching at the poles, and it writes into a byte array rather than a
canvas — a pure function, testable, with no 2D context to be unavailable.

Two things the derivation cannot do, both stated on screen next to the
measurements it rests on. Equilibrium temperature ignores greenhouse
warming and internal heat, so Venus comes out at 300 K against a real
surface of 737 K and Io, kept molten by tides, classifies as ice. And
these are illustrations: reasoned, but not observations.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-05 06:52:22 +00:00
Claude a84e2d3a69 Put a reference grid under the system view
A system was a handful of ellipses floating in the dark. You could see
that one orbit was bigger than another, but not how big, and not that a
planet sat above or below the plane the others share.

Adds the same plane-and-tether reading aid the outer scales got: a polar
grid in the system's own reference plane, with a drop line from each body
onto it.

Ring radii snap to a 1-2-5 ladder rather than dividing the system evenly,
because the point is to put a number on a distance — 5, 10, 15 AU can be
read at a glance and 4.34, 8.68, 13.02 cannot. That holds across the four
orders of magnitude real systems span: the solar system gets 5 AU rings,
TRAPPIST-1 gets 0.01 AU ones. The outermost ring encloses the outermost
orbit rather than falling just inside it.

The rings are dashed. Solid ones would sit in the same plane as the orbit
ellipses, which are themselves rings, and at a glance a reference circle
and a circular orbit are the same picture. Dashes are cut by dropping
whole segments rather than by a dashed material: the ring is already built
from independent segment pairs, so a material's dash pattern would restart
at every one.

Drawing the grid exposed a framing bug it made unmissable. The camera
settled along one fixed direction derived from the ecliptic, which is
face-on only for the one system whose elements are ecliptic. Every
exoplanet system — measured against the plane of the sky, perpendicular to
the line of sight to its own host star — was being presented nearly
edge-on, a smear of overlapping ellipses. The settle direction is now
taken relative to whichever plane the system was measured in, so all of
them read as discs. The solar system is unmoved, which a test pins.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 20:32:31 +00:00
Claude 2e525fb5c3 Open the map out to the whole Milky Way
The map stopped at the catalogued 50 pc around the Sun — 0.33% of the
Galaxy's width — and looked like a point cloud with a search box.

Adds the galactic scale above it and the heads-up display the reference
map is built from.

The Galaxy is not a third coordinate space. It is the same parsec space
four orders of magnitude further out, so the model and the star field
crossfade against camera distance instead of switching, and the Sun stays
where it really is: 8.18 kpc out, on the Orion Spur, between the
Sagittarius and Perseus arms. The depth range scales with that distance —
one fixed near/far pair cannot both fly into a star and hold the Galaxy.

The structure in shared/astro/galaxy.ts is measured: the directions of the
centre and the north galactic pole, which fix the disc's 63 degree tilt
against the celestial equator; the Sun's galactocentric distance; and a
radius, azimuth and pitch angle per arm. The particles scattered around it
are not, and cannot be — dust hides the disc, so no catalogue holds the
Galaxy's stars. The view says so, and the model fades out before the
camera reaches the 50 pc where the real stars are.

The rest is the look: polar grids lying in the galactic plane with drop
lines from the Sun's neighbours, a scale ladder, a readout panel, range,
reticle and frame brackets. Two things had to give way for it. The
deep-sky shell is the sky as seen from here, so it dissolves rather than
letting the camera fly through a wall of nebulae, and so does the skybox,
which is a photograph taken from inside the thing now being viewed from
outside. Labels are picked by screen separation rather than distance
alone: the Sun's fifteen nearest neighbours are all inside four parsecs
and printed as one unreadable clump.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 19:59:01 +00:00
Claude 2f45fa7fef Measure exoplanet inclination from the plane of the sky
The Exoplanet Archive measures orbital inclination from the plane of the sky —
the plane perpendicular to our line of sight to the host star. Ninety degrees
means edge-on as seen from Earth, which is why transiting planets pile up there:
1643 of the 2061 published inclinations are within five degrees of 90. The
renderer fed that straight into a propagator that reads inclination as an angle
from the reference plane, so every transiting system was tilted against a plane
its inclination was never measured against.

Each body's elements are now rotated out of their own reference plane into the
scene by a per-body quaternion. Solar-system elements keep the ecliptic rotation
from the previous commit. Exoplanets get a rotation carrying the elements' +Z
onto the line of sight to their host, which is exactly the star's own position —
so an inclination of i means the orbit's normal sits i from our line of sight,
which is the definition.

The rotation about that axis is the node's position angle on the sky. The
archive does not publish it and the ETL does not request it, so the shortest arc
is used: deterministic, and no less arbitrary than anything else given no data.
Planets with no published inclination default to face-on, which is the honest
reading of an unconstrained orbit rather than a guess at a tilt.

Unifying this replaced the direct eclipticToEquatorial call in the renderer, so
solar-system bodies and moons come out exactly where they did before — verified
against Sol side by side.

Tests: 253 passing, up from 247. The strongest one is the definition itself: a
90-degree planet must pass through our line of sight to the star, which is what
a transit is. One test of mine had to be corrected rather than the code — it
asserted that two systems at the same inclination must occupy different planes,
which is not guaranteed once the node angle is arbitrary, while each still sits
at the correct angle to its own host.

Note the e2e camera-flight test flaked once under parallel load during this
work, then passed in isolation and on two further full runs. Its click-until-
entered poll has a fixed 15s budget that a loaded machine can exceed; that is
pre-existing and unrelated to this change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 18:05:07 +00:00
Claude 2293585940 Put orbits and stars in the same reference frame
The app's two sources disagree about which frame they are in, and nothing
reconciled them. HYG star positions are equatorial J2000 — that is what
raDecDistanceToXyz produces and what the galaxy view renders directly. Orbital
elements come from JPL Horizons, whose default reference plane for element
output is the ecliptic, and the ETL never overrides it. The two are tilted 23.4
degrees apart, so the orbits sat that far off the sky they are drawn against.

Confirmed rather than assumed, from both ends: the Horizons request in
lib/horizons.ts sets no REF_PLANE, and the resulting solar-system inclinations
are 0 to 17 degrees with Earth exactly 0.00 — which is only true of the ecliptic,
since Earth's orbit defines it.

eclipticToEquatorial now rotates orbit positions into the scene frame, so a
direction means the same thing in the galaxy view and the system view. The
rotation is about the vernal-equinox axis, which both frames share.

That exposed a presentation problem the old code had been hiding. The renderer
mapped the propagator's z straight onto the scene's vertical, which silently
redefined the frame but did make systems render flat. In a properly equatorial
scene, orbital planes lie 23.4 degrees off the scene's own axes, so a system
would be presented edge-on. Rather than rotate the world back into a comfortable
pose — which would only put the orbits at odds with the sky again — the camera
now settles relative to the orbital plane: a three-quarter view about 37 degrees
off the ecliptic normal. The arrival still begins along the approach direction
and swings round as it settles, so the transition stays continuous, and the
framing is now the same every time rather than inherited from wherever the
camera happened to be.

Tests: 247 passing, up from 237. The frame tests are the discriminating kind —
Earth's orbit must lie perpendicular to the ecliptic pole rather than to the
scene's vertical, and must reach 23.4 degrees of declination a quarter orbit on,
where it used to read zero. Verified in a browser against Sol and Gl 357.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 16:10:17 +00:00
Claude dad4b93e8a Rank search results instead of taking the first eight
Search scanned the index in construction order — 8750 stars, then 18 bodies,
then 6319 exoplanets — collected substring matches, and stopped at eight. With
no scoring, position in the index decided everything.

Typing "Io" returned eight stars named "Iot Cas", "Iot Eri" and so on, and never
reached the moon Io — despite Io being an *exact* match, because the scan had
already filled up 8750 entries before the bodies begin. "Kepler" returned
Kepler-939 b, Kepler-1292 b, Kepler-223 d and five more in whatever order the
archive happened to list them.

Everything is now scored before anything is taken, so where an entry sits in the
index cannot hide a better match. Exact beats prefix beats word-start beats
substring, with the gaps wide enough that a worse kind of match can never
outrank a better one. Ties break on kind — the eighteen solar-system bodies
first, then stars, then exoplanets, so "Proxima" offers the star before its own
planets — then on name length, then alphabetically, so the order is fully
determined rather than inherited from the input. Matching is punctuation
insensitive as well as case insensitive, so "gl357" finds "Gl 357".

"Io" now returns the moon first. "Kepler" returns Kepler-4 b through Kepler-9 d.

The index is pre-normalised once on load rather than per keystroke. Lowercasing,
stripping punctuation and splitting 15,000 names on every character typed costs
about 11 ms, which is most of a frame, and search shares a thread with the render
loop — so it stuttered the scene while typing. Precomputing takes a broad query
down to 2.5 ms and a narrow one to 0.5 ms, for one 15 ms build during the
existing data load.

Adds the first tests this component has had, alongside the ranking's own.

Tests: 237 passing, up from 206. Verified in a real browser.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 11:55:34 +00:00
Claude f2c77fb5ad Scale the system view to the system it is showing
Star size, planet marker size and camera distance were all fixed constants in
AU, tuned against the solar system's 30 AU span. Real systems span four orders
of magnitude, and the fixed values served only the wide end. Measured across the
370 systems that draw planets:

  - 170 had their innermost orbit inside the 0.2 AU star sphere, and for 107 of
    those every orbit was inside it, so the system rendered as a lone sphere.
  - 193 were framed from the 3 AU distance floor — for TRAPPIST-1 that is 48x
    the width of the entire system, reducing it to a cluster of specks.
  - Planet markers were effectively a flat 0.09 AU, since almost every body
    clamps to the maximum. Inside Gl 357's 0.204 AU system that is wider than
    the orbits themselves: one planet swallowed the whole view.

All three are now derived from the system's own measurements. The star is a
fraction of the innermost orbit, so it can never reach the closest one. The
camera is a multiple of the outermost orbit, so everything fits. Markers scale
with the span against the solar system as the reference, so the constants that
were tuned by eye keep their meaning. Because star, markers and camera all
scale together, a compact system now looks like a wide one — same apparent star,
same legible spread of orbits.

Gl 357 is the case that motivated this. It gained three planets in the previous
commit and still rendered as a bare star, because all three orbits were inside
the star sphere. It now shows its star and all three orbits.

The renderer measures the span before building anything, since markers are sized
against it as they are created, which also removes the reduce over tracked
bodies that used to compute it afterwards. The star sphere is rebuilt per system
rather than shared, so its geometry is now disposed on each transition.

Sol is deliberately unchanged: its innermost orbit is Mercury at 0.387 AU, so
the star lands just under the old fixed radius, and the reference span makes the
marker scale factor 1. Verified side by side.

Tests: 206 passing, up from 199. Verified in a real browser against both ends of
the range — Gl 357 at 0.2 AU and Sol at 30 AU.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 11:43:29 +00:00
Claude f241b093eb Draw the 1509 exoplanets that were being silently dropped
The system renderer required both a semi-major axis and an eccentricity before
it would place an exoplanet, even though resolveOrbitalElements already defaults
every other missing element. The archive publishes an axis far more often than
an eccentricity: 3895 records have one and only 2386 have both, so 1509 planets
were dropped for want of a value that can simply be assumed.

A missing eccentricity now defaults to 0, a circle. That is the conventional
assumption for an orbit whose shape has not been constrained, and it is the only
honest option available, since the axis alone says nothing about elongation.

The effect is not subtle. 18 systems gain planets, and seven of them previously
rendered as a bare star with nothing around it at all: Gl 357 goes from zero
planets to three, HD 176986 likewise. Beyond the effect today, a user could
already reach one of these planets through search and its detail page, then jump
to its system and find it missing from the very system it belongs to.

isPropagatableOrbit replaces the old inline guard and also rejects what the old
one never checked: a non-positive axis, and an eccentricity of 1 or more. Those
are escape trajectories that no ellipse describes, and propagating them anyway
does not throw — it yields NaN, which reaches the vertex buffer and poisons the
geometry's bounding sphere, disabling culling for the whole object rather than
just the bad orbit. Being a type guard, it also lets the caller drop a seven-line
field-by-field copy of the orbit.

Fixes a label leak found while verifying this in the browser. Galaxy star labels
were being cleared on entering system space but immediately recomputed, because
the tick gated them on `currentStarId`, which is not assigned until the arrival
flight finishes a second later — so parsec-scale names sat pinned over the
system. Both label and orbit updates now gate on which group is actually visible,
which is true throughout the transition rather than only at the end of it.

Tests: 185 passing, up from 171. Verified in a real browser: GJ 1151 draws the
orbit and marker it gained, and no labels survive into the system view.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 11:31:59 +00:00
Claude 8d8c65bdb2 Propagate exoplanets with their real orbital period
Every exoplanet was propagated with gmForParent(undefined) — the Sun's
gravitational parameter — so the whole catalogue orbited as though each host
were exactly one solar mass. Most hosts are red dwarfs far lighter than that,
and a heavier central mass pulls harder and shortens the period, so their
planets were whirling round much too fast: TRAPPIST-1 is 0.09 solar masses, and
its planets were completing an orbit in roughly a third of the true time.

pl_orbper was already in the TAP query and was being discarded on the way into
the record. It is now kept, along with st_mass. A period and a semi-major axis
together pin the host's gravitational parameter exactly, via GM = n^2 a^3 — no
stellar model, no assumption, just the inverse of the orbitalPeriodDays helper
that was already there.

resolveGravitationalParameter picks the best available source: the measured
period, else the published host mass, else one solar mass as before. A derived
value implying something outside 0.01-150 solar masses is rejected and falls
through, since a period and axis taken from disagreeing solutions would
otherwise send a planet spinning at a visibly absurd rate.

Note the direction of the error, which is the opposite of what it looks like:
assuming a *heavier* host than reality makes a planet orbit *faster*. A test
pins it, and caught me stating it backwards first.

The NASA Exoplanet Archive is unreachable from this environment (egress policy
returns 403 on CONNECT), so exoplanets.json cannot be regenerated here and still
carries no periods. Behaviour is therefore unchanged until `npm run etl` is run
somewhere with archive access, at which point every planet with a published
period starts moving correctly with no further code changes. build.ts reports
how many records gained a period, and rejects non-positive ones.

Tests: 171 passing, up from 151, including a new end-to-end check that
TRAPPIST-1 b with its real period completes exactly one orbit in 1.51088 days
and sits a full diameter away at half that.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 11:19:45 +00:00
Claude c1feb4b74e Rewrite the star field as instanced billboards
Plan step 3 promises glow and size driven by magnitude and spectral type, but
the star field was a THREE.Points cloud and the WebGPU backend — the renderer
this app targets — caps point primitives at a single pixel. Every one of the
8750 stars drew as an identical 1 px dot with a hard edge, discarding the
magnitude sizing entirely; the class comment already admitted sizeNode only did
anything on the WebGL2 fallback.

Each star is now an instanced camera-facing quad on a SpriteNodeMaterial, which
behaves the same on both backends. That material takes each instance's centre
from positionNode rather than from an instance matrix, so position, colour and
size ride on instanced buffer attributes and the mesh itself never moves. A
radial falloff in opacityNode gives each star a bright core inside a soft halo.

Sizes are angular rather than world-space. That keeps a star the same apparent
size at any camera distance, which is both what the old screen-space points did
and what is physically right: real stars are unresolvable point sources, so
apparent size follows brightness, not distance. World-space quads would instead
have made the whole field vanish at the camera's 2000 pc limit.

Picking had to be rebuilt. Billboarding happens in the vertex shader, so the
CPU-side geometry is one quad at the origin and Raycaster cannot see the star
field at all. Selection is now done in screen space against the size each star
is actually drawn at, which is strictly better than the fixed 1.2 pc world
radius it replaces — that radius was over-permissive up close and sub-pixel at
the far end of a 4000x camera range. Stars behind the camera need an explicit
depth guard, because project() mirrors them back onto the screen.

Two things only caught by running it. The colour attribute was declared with
node type 'color', which is not a GLSL type, so the generated shader failed to
compile — it has to be vec3. And the click tolerance was first written as a
floor on the drawn radius, which flattened every star to one hit size, since a
floor generous enough for the faintest star exceeds the brightest star's radius;
adding the slop instead keeps a brighter star the easier target.

Tests: 151 passing, up from 145. Verified in a real browser — shaders compile
clean and the Playwright click-to-select flight passes against the new picking.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 11:11:23 +00:00
Claude 4aca223027 Regenerate the star catalogue, fixing 2331 names and 875 colours
Two ETL bugs, both fixed at the source and then re-run against HYG. Star ids,
ordering and positions are all unchanged, so stars.bin is byte-identical and
every exoplanet cross-reference still resolves.

Names. HYG's `gl` column already carries its own catalogue prefix ("Gl 581",
"GJ 3512"), unlike the bare numbers in `hd` and `hip`, so prefixing it again
produced 2331 of 8750 stars named "Gl GJ 1076". That corrupted three surfaces at
once: search, the on-screen labels, and exoplanet host-star name matching, which
compares normalised names and could never match "glgj1076" to "gj1076".

Colours. `Number(row['ci']) || 0` cannot tell a blank cell from a real zero, and
0 is a real B-V colour index meaning a hot blue-white A-type star. All 875
affected stars turned out to be blanks — the catalogue contains no genuine zero
inside the distance cutoff — so several hundred red dwarfs were rendering
blue-white. colorIndex is now `number | null` rather than defaulted, because any
numeric default is indistinguishable from a measurement.

Consumers resolve the gap from the spectral type instead. That needs real
parsing: HYG's `spect` column runs to 134 distinct spellings among the affected
stars alone, including a bare lowercase "m" for 354 of them, plus "k-m" ranges,
"dM4" luminosity prefixes and "K:" uncertainty flags. 622 of the 875 recover a
class this way — 497 of them M-class — and the remaining 253, which carry no
classification at all, fall back to neutral white.

The parse is anchored at the start of the string rather than scanning it. A scan
is the obvious implementation and is quietly wrong: the ETL writes the literal
"Unknown" for unclassified stars, that contains a K, and every one of those 253
would have been classified as an orange K-type. A test covers it.

Also lifts parseOptionalNumber out of fetchExoplanets into lib/csv, where both
fetchers now use it, and gives magnitude a faint default instead of 0 — no
current star is affected, but 0 would mean "as bright as Vega" and render an
unphotometered star as one of the largest points on the map.

Tests: 145 passing, up from 116, including the first coverage of
StarFieldRenderer. Build, both typechecks and the Playwright suite are green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-04 10:56:30 +00:00
Claude 06cf7d2a15 Fix four defects a user hits in the first minute
Found by surveying the codebase against the plan; each was verified against the
committed assets or the running app before being touched.

TRAPPIST-1 was orbiting the Sun. The Exoplanet Archive leaves sy_dist blank for
some systems, and fetchExoplanets.ts read it with bare Number() — Number('') is
0, which is finite, so it slipped past the Number.isFinite guard in
resolveHostStarId, placed the host at the origin, and matched Sol at distance
exactly 0. 127 records shipped with hostStarId 0, all seven TRAPPIST-1 planets
among them, and the system view filters on that id, so drilling into Sol drew
127 alien worlds inside the real solar system.

Fixed in three places: resolveHostStarId now rejects a non-positive distance
(the robust guard, covering every caller), fetchExoplanets.ts uses the
parseOptionalNumber that already sat unused in that same file for ra/dec/dist,
and validateExoplanets asserts nothing ever resolves to the Sun again — the Sun
has no exoplanets, so that tripwire costs nothing and is permanent.

The archive's endpoint is blocked by this environment's egress policy, so the
ETL cannot be re-run here. The committed asset was corrected in place instead,
which is safe because the outcome is deterministic: the name path runs first and
none of the 127 resolve by name, so all of them reached id 0 positionally and
the fixed pipeline yields null for exactly that set. Cross-referenced hosts drop
from 761 to 634; record count is unchanged.

Dragging to rotate selected stars. Selection was bound to the raw click event,
which browsers fire on release however far the pointer travelled and which
OrbitControls does not suppress — so any drag ending over a star launched a
camera flight, and in system view routed away to /body/:id. Now tracks
pointerdown and ignores a release more than 5 px from it.

Ghost systems accumulated on every star-to-star hop. SystemOrbitsRenderer.dispose
released geometries and materials but never detached its group, so old orbit
lines stayed parented forever — still traversed and re-uploaded each frame with
disposed geometries, drawn over the new system and unpickable. dispose() now
detaches and clears.

Galaxy star labels stayed pinned inside the system view. They are CSS2D objects
parented to the scene rather than to galaxyGroup, so hiding the group left up to
15 parsec-space names clumped over the system's star. Cleared on entry. Also
gated the per-frame Kepler propagation on actually being in a system; it ran in
galaxy view too, because the renderer is never nulled on exit.

Tests: 116 passing, up from 112. Build, both typechecks and the Playwright suite
are green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-03 16:53:28 +00:00
Claude 3a859360ba Add the deep-sky backdrop, the last unbuilt piece of the plan
The design doc scopes deep-sky objects as a galaxy-view backdrop and lists
fetchDeepSky.ts, deepsky.json and deepsky.model.ts, but none of it existed —
it was the only part of the plan with no implementation behind it.

ETL: fetchDeepSky.ts pulls the OpenNGC catalog, classifies each object as a
galaxy/nebula/cluster, and keeps the ~460 worth drawing (everything Messier,
everything with a common name, and anything brighter than magnitude 9) out of
~12,000 mostly-anonymous rows. build.ts runs it and validates the output.

Distances are the hard part: OpenNGC has no distance column, and both fallbacks
fail for the best-known objects. M31, M33 and M42 are Local Group members whose
redshift is negative or absent, and a galaxy's catalog parallax comes from a
cross-matched foreground star — 6 mas for M31 would put a 780 kpc galaxy at
167 pc. So records store a unit direction on the celestial sphere rather than a
position (the line of sight is always known precisely, and the objects are drawn
on a fixed backdrop shell where true distance is unusable anyway), and distance
is optional metadata carrying its own provenance. Parallax is trusted only for
galactic objects, redshift only above z=0.003 where expansion outweighs peculiar
velocity. 330 of 463 get a distance; the rest honestly report none.

Rendering: DeepSkyRenderer paints the objects as soft additive billboards on a
2500 pc shell — clear of the 50 pc star field, beyond the camera's 2000 pc orbit
limit, and inside its 5000 pc far plane. Size comes from real angular extent, so
Andromeda is six times wider than the full Moon, clamped at both ends. Sprites
rather than points because the WebGPU backend caps point primitives at one pixel;
materials are shared per kind and brightness band, so 460 objects cost nine of
them. The brightest dozen get permanent labels, which needed the label overlay to
accept string ids alongside numeric star ids. The backdrop is decorative, so a
failure to load its dataset is logged and the star field comes up regardless.

Also documents the app in the README, which until now covered only the plugin
marketplace.

Tests: 112 passing, up from 54. Build, both typechecks and the Playwright suite
are green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01WaySiNst4HhDXBHnMy8p5G
2026-08-03 15:19:39 +00:00
Senrokai d7e8ea1d4d @
Add star-map Angular app, ETL pipeline, and caveman plugin

Angular 3D star map (galaxy/system/body views, Three.js rendering,
navigation store) plus the NASA ETL tooling that builds the star,
exoplanet and solar-system datasets, Playwright e2e suite, and the
cs:caveman Claude Code plugin (command, agent, skill).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
@
2026-08-03 16:50:10 +02:00
Senrokai 1e1b58b0e9 Initial commit 2026-07-15 16:54:27 +02:00