Commit Graph
17 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 a81dd491ad Say which band each star was measured in, whose catalogue it is, and how sure its distance is
The readout named Hipparcos, Yale and Gliese while 378 775 of the 455 608 stars are described by
Gaia DR3, printed one "Magnitude" for G and V alike, and gave every distance to the parsec. The
band cannot be read off the star's source, which records whose position it has: 62 002 stars Gaia
places keep HYG's V and B-V, and the 575 hosts renamed after their planets are Gaia's, in G.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 23:26:27 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 4c8e4a02f3 Give every planet with a distance a star, from the archive where the catalogue has none
After matching, 4 237 planets still had no star: their hosts are too faint for either Gaia
query (fainter than G 12 past 50 pc) or too far (past 250 pc), Kepler-186 at 177.6 pc among
them. fetchExoplanets now adds one star per such host from the archive's own figures, 3 277
of them, whenever the archive gives a position and a distance:

- position carried back from J2016, where the archive publishes it (741 of the 746 matched
  hosts moving over 100 mas/yr sit nearer their star carried back, a median 0.11" against 3.47"
  as published), and placed at sy_dist;
- magnitude in V (2 999 hosts), else Gaia G (13), the band the catalogue's Gaia stars are
  already in; 265 have neither, 128 KMT, 95 OGLE and 32 MOA microlensing hosts at a median
  6.2 kpc among them, and take the ETL's faint stand-in of 15;
- colour as B-V from the archive's B and V, else from st_teff through a new
  temperatureToColorIndex (Ballesteros 2012, inverted; the Sun's 5 772 K gives 0.65), else
  left to st_spectype;
- ids from 1 070 000 000, past Gaia's two ranges and under the 2^30 validateStars enforces;
  source "exoplanet-archive".

Hosts past 250 pc are included: 399 of the 3 277 are within 250 pc, 1 962 between 250 pc and
1 kpc, 916 beyond. The drawn budget still chooses what is drawn (70 000 of 455 608).

Planets with a star: 2 090 -> 6 327 of 6 354. The other 27 have no distance in either table
(Luhman 16 A, mu2 Sco, PSR B1620-26 among them). Systems in the Solar Neighbourhood readout:
1 450 -> 4 736. validateExoplanets now refuses a catalogue where fewer than 99.5 % of planets
have a host (measured 99.58 %); dropping the added stars fails it at 2 090, and dropping the
composite fill at 6 227. No added star sits within an arcsecond of a catalogue star
(validateMerge's twins stay at 23); 5 of the 399 within 250 pc have one within a minute of arc,
VHS J125601.92-125723.9 (archive 12.7 pc) 5.8" from a Gaia entry at 21.2 pc the likeliest
duplicate.

In the app, searching TRAPPIST-1 or Kepler-186 and picking the star enters a system with its
seven and five planets drawn. gzip -9: stars.bin 5 030 741 -> 5 067 864 B, stars-meta.bin 2 784 614 -> 2 804 064,
stars-index.json 4 003 584 -> 4 015 882, exoplanets.json 342 467 -> 446 532 (host parameters,
both commits).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 22:09:16 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 494fb5616b Find the hosts the catalogue already holds, and name them after their planets' star
The archive's default-parameter rows leave sy_dist blank for 100 planets, TRAPPIST-1's seven
among them, so the matcher could not place a host the catalogue had drawn since the Gaia
nearby query (Gaia DR3 2635476908753563008, 12.47 pc). fetchExoplanets now also reads the
Planetary Systems Composite table (pscomppars) and fills a default row's blank host cells from
it. Only host columns: a composite row takes each column from its own reference, so orbits
still come from the default row alone, one fit per planet. Where both tables give a distance or
a position they agree on all 6 225 and 6 352 rows.

Three hosts the catalogue holds by name failed the distance ratio test because the archive's
sy_dist, from TICv8, contradicts its own parallax: Lalande 21185 (GJ 411) 5.68 pc against
392 mas, Luyten's Star (GJ 273) 5.92 against 263 mas, Struve 2398 B (Gl 725 B) 6.84 against
285 mas. resolveHostStarId now takes the archive's parallax (sy_plx) as a second distance the
ratio test accepts. It is a second chance, not a replacement: 47 of 5 959 systems disagree past
the tolerance, and for faint far hosts the inverse parallax is the worse figure (K2-238: 538 pc
by sy_dist, 6 779 by parallax).

Planets on a catalogue star: 2 071 -> 2 090 of 6 354. The 19 gained are TRAPPIST-1 (7),
GJ 273 (2), GJ 411 (2), Gl 725 B, HD 62509 (Pollux), K2-65, TOI-2267 A and B, and two
brown-dwarf hosts, 2MASS J02192210-3925225 and DENIS-P J082303.1-491201. No planet lost or
changed its host.

A matched host whose catalogue name is a bare Gaia designation now takes the archive's host
name, so search finds TRAPPIST-1, Teegarden's Star, TOI-700, LP 791-18 and K2-18: 575 stars
renamed. validateExoplanets refuses a host that is still only a designation, and the star
assets are rewritten after the exoplanets for that reason; stars.bin and stars-meta.bin are
unchanged. TOI-2267 A and B both land on one Gaia entry, which takes the name TOI-2267 A.

Each planet also carries its host's radius, effective temperature and luminosity (10^st_lum),
and a mass for 6 344 planets instead of 5 474, from the default row where it gives one and the
composite table otherwise, for the star-physics step.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 22:02:56 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 c01d3ec2bc Read OpenNGC's addendum, so the Pleiades and the Large Magellanic Cloud are on the map
OpenNGC keeps the objects no NGC or IC number covers in a second file, addendum.csv, with the
same 32 semicolon-separated columns as NGC.csv. The ETL only ever fetched NGC.csv, so the
brightest deep-sky object in the sky, the Large Magellanic Cloud (V 0.29), was missing while
the Small one was drawn, and so were the Pleiades (M45), the Hyades, the Horsehead and the
Coalsack. fetchDeepSky now fetches the addendum beside NGC.csv, caches it as
openngc-addendum.csv, and runs its rows through the same loop.

Of its 64 rows, 27 pass the existing filters: all 22 named or Messier rows except M40, which
OpenNGC types as a double star, and M102, typed as a duplicate of M101; plus seven anonymous
open clusters brighter than V 9 (H05, H20, H21, Mel071, Mel101, Mel105, MWSC3171). deepsky.json
goes from 463 to 490 objects (galaxies 73 -> 85, clusters 294 -> 306, nebulae 96 -> 99), with
no existing record changed. Messier coverage goes from 106 to 107 of 110. 340 of the 490 have
a distance: the Pleiades 135.8 pc and the Coma Star Cluster 85.9 pc from their parallaxes;
the Hyades and the Local Group dwarfs honestly have none.

validateDeepSky now requires the Andromeda Galaxy and the Small Magellanic Cloud from NGC.csv,
the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Pleiades from the addendum, and at least 107 Messier
objects. Both checks were run against the real catalogue with the addendum removed: the ETL
fails on "Deep-sky object ESO056-115 is missing", and with the required list emptied, on
"Only 106 Messier objects were produced".

In the app, on the dev server: 490 sprites. The Pleiades sprite lies 0.00182 deg from Alcyone
(0.00183 deg from the published coordinates); the LMC 18.4209 deg from Canopus and 26.8215 deg
from Achernar (18.4209 and 26.8215 published); the Hyades 2.2591 deg from Aldebaran (2.2591).
The twelve labelled deep-sky objects now open with the Large Magellanic Cloud and the
Pleiades and include Brocchi's Cluster, in place of h Persei, chi Persei and NGC 2516.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 20:59:39 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 74b93a0428 Fill in the Sun's faint neighbours from Gaia, and fold the Gliese entries they repeat
Gaia's G < 12 cut took a quarter of what lies within 10 pc: the red,
brown and white dwarfs most of the neighbourhood is made of, which the
map only had where Gliese happened to list them. Teegarden's Star was
missing, and with it its three planets' host.

A second query fetches the complement out to 50 pc: G >= 12 or no G,
parallax > 20 mas, with pmra/pmdec so the J2016 -> J2000 propagation
applies. The quality filter was chosen by counting. Parallax over error
> 5 keeps 39 751 of the 39 764 sources that pass the floor, but the Gaia
Catalogue of Nearby Stars (GCNS; Gaia Collaboration, Smart et al. 2021)
rejects 11 752 of them as spurious: median G 20.2, astrometric excess
noise 5.4 mas against 0.15 for the ones it keeps, 6 933 toward the
Galactic centre. So the query joins the GCNS main table (EDR3 astrometry
and source ids, which DR3 carries unchanged) and keeps 28 012 rows; the
error cut stays and costs no GCNS source, brown dwarfs included. The
query has its own row-count floor (28 012) and the row-limit cap, and is
ordered by (phot_g_mean_mag, source_id); a second ETL run reproduced
stars.bin, stars-meta.bin and stars-index.json byte for byte. Its ids
start at 1 050 000 000, clear of the main query's and under 2^30, which
V8 keeps unboxed: numbered from 2 000 000 000 they made the app's boot
task 230 ms longer (medians of five interleaved runs, 1.41 s against
1.18). validateStars now refuses an id outside 0 to 2^30.

The Gliese entries these stars duplicate were not folded: HYG carries
them with positions off by up to a minute of arc and photometric
distances, so they missed the 15" tolerance or failed the distance test.
Their proper motions, which Gliese measured well, give them away:
isSameStar now takes two entries moving within 20 % of each other as one
star up to 60" apart, whatever their distances, brightness still
permitting. Of the 602 Gliese-only rows left without a counterpart, 253
have such a Gaia entry; with every entry shifted a quarter degree, none
does. fetchStars passes HYG's motions only for rows without Hipparcos
astrometry: given them too, 15 Hipparcos stars took a co-moving
companion's Gaia entry and the cross-catalogue pairs under an arcsecond
went from 23 to 35. Of HYG's 1 200 stars fainter than V 12 within 25 pc,
1 024 now sit on a Gaia position (325 before); of the 176 left alone, 43
still have a Gaia entry 3-60" away (218 without the motion rule), some of
them real companions.

Measured on the rebuilt catalogue, against the GCNS (sources with
parallax > 100, 40 and 20 mas):
  within 10 pc  336 -> 372  (GCNS 312; the map adds 60 HYG-only stars)
  within 25 pc  3 652 -> 5 560  (GCNS 5 111)
  within 50 pc  13 702 -> 40 916  (GCNS 40 231)
452 331 stars (+27 214). Proxima, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359, Rigel, Deneb
and Alnilam are all present by name; Teegarden's Star is Gaia DR3
35227046884571776 at 3.83 pc and hosts its three planets. Luhman 16 is
not in Gaia DR3 with a parallax (5353626573555863424 has a two-parameter
solution) and stays absent. 94 more exoplanets find a host (2 071), none
changes host. TRAPPIST-1 is now drawn (Gaia DR3 2635476908753563008,
12.47 pc) but its planets are not yet matched to it.

Merge gate, ceilings unchanged: HYG rows without a Gaia counterpart
12 352 -> 11 554 (ceiling 15 000; 10 886 before the naked-eye stars),
cross-catalogue pairs under an arcsecond 23 -> 23 (ceiling 100). The
gate's comment now accounts for the survivors by magnitude.

gzip -9 sizes against the catalogue before both changes: stars.bin
4 711 922 -> 5 030 741 B, stars-meta.bin 2 576 213 -> 2 784 614 B,
stars-index.json 3 724 855 -> 4 003 584 B (+806 KB, 7.3 %). Boot on the
dev server, five interleaved cold runs: the task that indexes the
catalogue after the data lands, median 1 072 -> 1 182 ms; HUD shown,
median 2 622 -> 2 716 ms. This machine measured 0.82-1.30 s for the
same baseline task today, above audit #25's 627-843 ms. The drawn-star
budget is unchanged.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 20:35:21 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5 c64eea0803 Keep every star the naked eye sees, Rigel, Deneb and Alnilam among them
The 250 pc cutoff took 1 543 of HYG's 8 920 stars of V 6.5 or brighter:
1 339 that both surveys put past it and 204 HYG has no distance for. Five
of the fifty brightest stars in the sky were gone (Rigel, Deneb, Alnilam,
gamma-2 Vel, Wezen), and Naos, Sadr, Aludra and Arneb with them, while
11th-magnitude Gaia stars at the same distance were drawn. The cutoff
bounds a download, not what the sky shows.

placementDistancePc now keeps a star of V 6.5 or brighter at any distance,
at the better of its two distances as before: Gaia's where the archive's
Hipparcos cross-match has a usable parallax, Hipparcos's otherwise. Gaia
saturates on the brightest, so Rigel (264.6 pc), Deneb (432.9), Alnilam
(606.1), Wezen (492.6), Naos, Sadr, Aludra and Arneb sit at their
Hipparcos distance. 1 502 HYG rows come back, 165 of the 206 without a
Hipparcos distance among them because Gaia measured them; 36 fold into a
Gaia entry. 41 naked-eye stars stay out because neither survey gives them
a distance: beta Phe, Polis, Mu Cep, Rho Cas, Eta Car, Alp Cam, Phi Cas,
Chi Aur, Psi-1 Aur, theta-1 Ori, Omi-1 Cen, 66 Ori, 16 Sgr, 10 Sge and 27
HD stars.

Measured on the rebuilt catalogue: 425 117 stars (+1 466), 8 301 of them
past 250 pc (+1 466), the same 336 within 10 pc and 3 652 within 25 pc.
Merge gate: 12 352 HYG rows without a Gaia counterpart (was 10 886; the
ceiling of 15 000 is unchanged, and its comment now counts the naked-eye
stars among the survivors) and the same 23 cross-catalogue pairs under an
arcsecond. Five more exoplanets find their host: HD 81817 b and c,
HD 158996 b, HD 208527 b, HD 220074 b. gzip -9 sizes: stars.bin
4 711 922 -> 4 728 315 B, stars-meta.bin 2 576 213 -> 2 587 977 B,
stars-index.json 3 724 855 -> 3 731 763 B.

The brief behind this also asked to cut once on the best distance, which
would drop the 6 835 stars Hipparcos puts inside 250 pc and Gaia outside.
Those already sit at Gaia's distance (4eb61ff), so nothing is misplaced,
and they stay.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-24 19:36:34 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 b7f277ea04 Answer the review: a short answer makes more survivors, and must not be skipped
Three things this got wrong. The direction: truncating Gaia leaves the HYG rows
whose counterpart it dropped without one, so survivors rise — 10 886 today,
12 711 at half the rows, 16 258 at a third — which the comment claimed was the
other way, and which decides whether the 15 000 ceiling can be leaned on at all
(it catches a truncation past about two thirds, and nothing shallower).

The throw: `fetchStars` catches everything a source throws and skips it, so a
truncated CSV was reported as "the archive was unreachable" one step after
`writeStarAssets` had already overwritten the published catalogue. Marked with
`GaiaAnswerError` and rethrown there, so an answer that cannot be worked with
fails the run where it happened. Measured end to end in a throwaway working
directory, 300 000 rows in the cache: fails, names the cache file to delete,
assets untouched. With the rethrow taken back out again: assets written, then
"the archive was unreachable".

The row limit: `rows.length >= ROW_LIMIT` is true for every reduced
ETL_GAIA_ROW_LIMIT, so the tripwire fired on exactly the deliberate slice the
override exists for — and told the operator to raise it. Gated on the same flag
as its neighbour. `ETL_GAIA_ROW_LIMIT=20000` now runs through; without the gate
it dies on the limit it was given.

Also: the row floor names the one cache file it is about rather than a glob that
takes the Hipparcos cross-match with it, and says an edited query is a third
reason it can fire — DEFAULT_QUERY_ROWS now sits under the query it counts.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 14:35:17 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 44f6a8d086 Refuse a Gaia answer that came back short, and read the body inside the retry
The merge gate asks whether Gaia contributed any stars, never how many. The TAP service truncates
on its own timeout and still serves a well-formed CSV with a 200, ordered by magnitude — so a half
answer is the bright half, which is the half HYG overlaps. Every gate passes: Gaia stars are
present, HYG survivors go down rather than up, unmerged twins can only fall. The weekly job would
publish a catalogue missing two hundred thousand stars and the runner would cache it for the weeks
after. `fetchGaiaStars` now refuses fewer than 95% of the 412 765 rows its query holds, as its
sibling query already did, and refuses an answer that fills the row limit.

`fetchText` retried the request but not the body: a connection reset part-way through the 57 MB
CSV rejected out of the loop, with no wait and no second attempt. The read now happens inside it.

Also corrected: the merge gate's account of the HYG survivors (two thirds of them are stars Gaia
measures but the main query never downloads, since Gaia puts them past the 250 pc cutoff), and the
refresh workflow's comment on what happens when the archive is unreachable.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-18 12:12:49 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 29d3ddb6ef Say so when Gaia is missing, rather than as 68 000 unmatched stars
With the merge gate in place, a Gaia DR3 outage no longer ships a HYG-only
catalogue: the ETL skips the unreachable source, and validateMerge then fails
on the survivor count. That is the right outcome and the wrong message: "68 000
HYG stars found no Gaia counterpart" sends the reader looking at the merge.
Gaia contributing nothing is now checked first, by name.

Two comments said Gaia was best-effort, in data-refresh.yml and on the merge
in fetchStars. They now say what happens instead.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-11 18:41:09 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5 f935bae3b3 Fail the ETL on a merge that keeps the same star twice
The catalogues are regenerated by a scheduled job that pushes straight to
main once the unit suite and a production build pass in the same run. Both
passed, every Monday, on a catalogue that carried 23 000 stars twice: the
suite tests code against fixtures, and no fixture is 400 000 real stars.
Nothing between the ETL and the map ever looked at what came out.

Two numbers now have to hold, and each is the signature of a way the merge
has actually failed here.

Different catalogues placing a star within an arcsecond of each other is
never two stars at this depth, and one catalogue does not list a star twice,
so every cross-source pair that close is a miss. Nineteen survive today —
each a second HYG row wanting a Gaia entry that already absorbed one, which
is how Gliese lists some doubles — against 1 112 in the catalogue on main,
where a Hipparcos parallax off by half outvoted a direction that agreed to
a hundredth of an arcsecond. The ceiling is 100.

The epoch failure leaves no close pair at all, because sixteen years of
proper motion had already carried the two entries tens of arcseconds apart.
What it leaves instead is HYG rows that found no counterpart: 36 056 on
main against the 10 876 Gaia genuinely lacks — the stars it saturates on and
the red dwarfs past its magnitude cut. The ceiling is 15 000.

The pair sweep sorts by declination and walks a one-arcsecond window, so it
costs about 300 ms on 423 641 stars — cheap enough to run on every ETL, which
is the point: the gate has to sit where the bot already is, before the push,
because a GITHUB_TOKEN push fires no CI of its own.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-09 21:10:23 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 080bbe16dc Match exoplanet hosts on the sky, at both epochs the archive might mean
The host cross-reference matched in 3D, nearest star within half a parsec.
That is the wrong space for the same reason the star merge learned it: a
direction is measured, a distance is inferred. At 170 pc half a parsec is a
ten-arcminute cone, wide enough to hand the planets of stars our catalogue
does not carry to whatever bright star floats nearest — HATS-6 b sat on
HD 39500, seventy arcseconds away. At 60 pc it is tighter than the routine
disagreement between the archive's Hipparcos distances and our Gaia ones,
which is how four bright giants (7 CMa, HD 81688, omi UMa, xi Aql) lost
their planets and GJ 15 A's landed on a neighbouring entry.

Hosts are now resolved like stars are merged: by name first, then the
nearest star on the sky within a transverse budget — angle times the
archive's distance, 0.01 pc — whose distance does not flatly contradict the
archive's (the merge's own 50 % ratio). The budget is transverse because the
dominant error is proper motion over an epoch difference, a physical
displacement that is the same in parsecs at every distance: as an angle it
is 60" for Proxima and 2" for a host at 100 pc. Measured on the 504 hosts
whose archive name matches a catalogue name outright, true pairs reach
3.4e-3 pc; shifting every host a quarter of a degree finds nothing else
within 0.01 but Proxima's own entry, whose budget at 1.3 pc is wider than
the shift.

The archive never says which epoch a position is for, and they are mixed:
alf Tau and GJ 273 publish J2000, HD 133131 and TOI-2459 publish Gaia's
J2016. So the query asks for sy_pmra/sy_pmdec too, tries each position at
both ends of those sixteen years, and judges a star on whichever is closer.
Guess one epoch and a fast star's planets land on a companion: J2016 puts
Aldebaran's on Gl 171.1B, J2000 puts GJ 15 A's on a Gaia entry 15.9" out.

1 972 of 6 354 planets now sit on a host, 1 548 before: 432 gained, 26 on a
better star (GJ 15 A to Groombridge 34, GJ 676 A off its companion,
HD 19994 to 94 Cet), 8 lost — six false 3D matches to stars the catalogue
never contained, and GJ 273 b/c, whose archive row says 5.92 pc for
Luyten's Star at 3.79: a distance in flat contradiction is exactly what the
ratio guard exists to refuse, and the number to fix is upstream.

The 2 pc "rematch" apparatus is gone. build.ts recomputed every match after
fetchExoplanets had already written the file — at a different tolerance, so
the log reported a match count the data did not contain — and the offline
entry point that persisted it had no caller. One matcher, one set of
constants, used once. The archive cache is now keyed by a hash of the TAP
query, so a response cached before the proper-motion columns cannot serve
rows without them, where a missing cell would quietly read as "does not
move"; the row's astrometry is stored with each planet, which is what made
these tolerances measurable offline in the first place.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-09-09 14:14:05 +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
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 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