5dec528cee36b4161e3aee2db413f37db284f99a
5
Commits
| Author | SHA1 | Message | Date | |
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 Claude
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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 |
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Claude
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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 |
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Claude
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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 |
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Claude
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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 |
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Claude
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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 |