The jump-link graph linked the whole catalogue: 3.7 million links at 8 pc, 7.4-7.8 s in the
worker and a 443-515 ms frame on the main thread when they landed, and most of them between stars
that were neither drawn nor clickable. A graph request now carries the star field's drawn stars,
and the worker links only those, over an index of its own with cells as wide as the range. The
scene asks again once a new drawn set has held still for 250 ms.
The renderer is handed the graph's bounding sphere instead of computing it: three.js walked every
vertex on the main thread in the first frame that drew a new graph, 48-55 ms at 8 pc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The adversarial review confirmed three defects in this PR, all reproduced in
the browser.
1. Superseded graphs queued up in front of routes. The worker answers
messages one at a time and cannot drop one it has started. With the
jump-link layer on, every pause on the range slider posted a full graph
build, seconds of work at 6-8 pc. Answers no longer wanted were thrown
away only once built. A route asked for afterwards waited behind every
one of them: a one-jump route took 44 s.
RoutingClient now holds requests and sends them one at a time. While one
is out, only the latest of each kind waits: a newer graph replaces an
older one before it is ever built, and the older promise is rejected with
SupersededRequest. Routes go ahead of graphs. The same question asked
again while outstanding shares the answer rather than being worked twice,
as when the layer is turned off and on during a build.
The same scenario in the browser (layer on, range stepped 5 -> 8 pc with
400 ms pauses, then Sol to Proxima): the route came back in 110 ms. The
worker was sent "links 3, links 5, route, links 8"; 6 and 7 were never
built.
2. A worker that failed left the panel stuck. With no error handling, a
worker that failed to load (a 404 on its chunk after a redeploy) or
threw left "Plotting…" and a disabled button for good, and a graph at a
range could not be asked for again.
The worker now answers an exception with a 'failed' message, which
rejects that request. A worker that fails to load or dies is abandoned,
and what it left outstanding, and everything asked afterwards, is
answered in place. The scene releases the panel when a route fails, and
forgets a graph range that was never drawn so it can be asked for again.
3. Nothing type-checked the worker. The application builder never reads
webWorkerTsConfig, and bundles the worker with esbuild, which strips
types without checking them. tsconfig.app.json leaves the file out. A
type error in the worker shipped.
`npm run worker:typecheck` (tsc -p tsconfig.worker.json) now runs in CI
beside the other project checks. webWorkerTsConfig is removed from
angular.json, since it only suggested that something checked the worker.
Tests with a fake worker cover one request at a time, a waiting graph
replaced and a route sent ahead of it, a question shared, a failure rejected
and the next request sent, and a failed worker's requests answered in place.
A scene test covers the panel released after a failed route. Negative
controls, each caught: several requests sent at once, a waiting graph kept,
graphs ahead of routes, a question asked twice, a failure answered as a
success, a failed worker waited on, the panel left pending, and a type error
in the worker (caught by worker:typecheck).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The label and star-field review fixes arrive under the routing client: the
scene keeps constructing RoutingClient beside the neighbourhood, and builds
the brightness index where it built the order. Both sides' new scene tests
are kept.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The adversarial review confirmed three costs this PR added, all reproduced in
the browser.
- The first pinned refocus stalled the first flight of a session. The
renderer built its own id-to-index Map of 423 651 entries the first time a
star was pinned, which is at the first selection, inside the approach
flight. The worst frame was 47-103 ms, and the Map stayed as a second copy
of a lookup the scene already had. The scene now pins by catalogue index,
through the StarNeighbourhood it builds at load (new `indexOf`), and the
renderer takes indices. First selection, measured in the browser: worst
frame 18 ms.
- At galactic scale every label pass rewrote the drawn set. The view centre
sweeps hundreds of parsecs a pass there, far past any star, so each pass
chose the same 70 000 stars again and uploaded 2 MB to the GPU: 11 times
on the flight out to the Galaxy. The scene no longer refocuses at galactic
scale, where the whole catalogue is a few pixels, and the renderer leaves
its buffers alone when the drawn set is unchanged. Flight to the Galaxy:
2 refocuses, no frame over 50 ms.
- At load the same set was chosen twice: once by the renderer's constructor
around the Sun, and again by the first label pass, centred on the Sun. The
scene now records the constructor's choice as the current focus.
Tests: the buffers keep their version for an unchanged set, no refocus at
load, none at galactic scale, and pins arrive as indices. Proxima's id in the
scene spec now differs from its index, so a lookup by id cannot pass for one
by index. Negative controls, each caught: an unchanged set rewritten anyway, a
refocus at galactic scale, the boot choice not recorded, and pins passed as
ids.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The label fix turns the brightness order into an index with positions and ids
laid out beside it. The star field only needs the order, so it is handed
`.order`. Both sides added scene tests in the same place; both are kept.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The adversarial review confirmed a regression in this PR. Near the Sun, the
label pass became three to four times slower than the scan and sort it
replaced.
Within about 11 pc of the Sun, and in any plan view zoomed tighter than that,
the label radius clamps to 4 pc. That sphere holds a few dozen faint dwarfs
deep in the brightness order, so the walk rarely finds fifteen stars to name
and reads nearly the whole catalogue. Reading the star objects in brightness
order jumps all over memory, so a full walk took 19-25 ms against the old
5-6 ms.
The review also found that spreadLabels checked the label count at the top of
its loop. After placing the fifteenth label it asked for a sixteenth
candidate, which near the Sun can lie at the far end of the order.
brightnessIndex now lays each star's position and id out beside the
brightness order, in that order. The walk tests stars from those arrays in
sequence and reads a star object only when it yields one. spreadLabels breaks
straight after placing the fifteenth label.
Measured on the real catalogue with the label logic reduced to what decides
placement, camera at the given distance from the Sun (old sort / this PR as
first pushed / now):
2 pc 4.9 / 24.7 / 2.5 ms
5 pc 5.7 / 23.0 / 3.1 ms
10 pc 6.3 / 18.2 / 0.95 ms
307 pc 22 / 0.01 / 0.00 ms (the opening view)
The labels are identical in every case. Now faster than the old sort at every
distance.
A new scene test counts the candidates spreadLabels takes: exactly fifteen for
fifteen labels. Negative controls, each caught: positions one axis off, ids in
catalogue order, the selected star dropped, the radius edge excluded, and the
count checked before taking a candidate.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The 2026-09-14 refresh (7f187e0) regenerated exoplanets.json on main with the
host matching this stack replaces, so the file conflicted again. Resolved by
keeping this branch's, for the same reason as last time: it is the output of
the reviewed pipeline, and what main's side adds is only archive rows
published since, which the next refresh re-fetches with the fixed code.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Route plotting ran on the main thread, and so did the jump-link graph:
- the range search for a far target, HD 2626 at 236 pc, takes 4-5 s;
- the graph at 8 pc is 3.7 million links, 6-10 s to build, then as many
link objects again to turn into vertices.
The map stopped for as long as either ran.
A Web Worker now does both. RoutingClient sends it the catalogue's ids and
positions once, and it keeps its own spatial index. A route question comes
back with the route, or with the range that would open one. A graph comes
back as one Float32Array of segment vertices, transferred rather than
copied.
On the scene side, only the latest route request is shown: an earlier
answer arriving later is dropped. Only the graph for the range last asked
for is drawn. The Routes panel says "Plotting…" and holds its button while
a request is out.
collectJumpLinks gave way to jumpLinkSegments, which writes the vertex pairs
straight into floats rather than building link objects first; the scene was
its only caller. The routing module (routing.ts) is the message protocol and
the one function answering it, so the worker is a dozen lines, and the same
answers are worked out in place where there is no Worker, as in the unit
tests' DOM. The worker is built with its own tsconfig, as the Angular
builder expects.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The star field draws a budget of the catalogue: everything within 25 pc of
the Sun, then the brightest of the rest. That choice was made once, at load,
around the Sun, and never again. On the Gaia catalogue it left most of the
map empty wherever the view went:
- a region 150 pc out drew 49 of the 442 stars within 25 pc of it;
- a plotted route ran through stars no one could see or click. Sol to
Almach at 8 pc passes 19 stars and drew 6, Sol to Mirfak 11 of 26;
- a search for a faint star flew the camera to an empty point.
The drawn set now follows the view. The scene chooses it again at the label
cadence, once the orbit target has moved more than 5 pc or the pinned stars
have changed. The budget goes, in order, to the selected star and the stars
of a plotted route, then everything within 25 pc of where the view is
centred, then the same around the Sun, then the brightest of the rest. The
instance buffers hold the budget and are rewritten in place.
Checked in Chromium on WebGPU, framing Mirfak from 12 pc: with the set
chosen around the Sun, 122 of the 649 stars within 25 pc were drawn;
following the view, all 649. At the opening view the drawn set is the same
as before.
A refocus takes 9 ms in the browser (5 ms of it choosing). The first version took
16-36 ms in the browser, a visible hitch during a flight. Most of that time
went on walking the 423 651-star brightness order once per neighbourhood,
out of catalogue order, and on recomputing 70 000 colours. Now both
neighbourhoods are gathered in one pass in catalogue order and sorted on
their own, and colours and sizes are computed once for the whole catalogue.
The brightness order itself sorts a typed copy of the magnitudes, taking
83 ms at load instead of 104-139 ms.
STAR_RENDER_BUDGET is now 70 000, and its comment gives the measurements
behind it rather than "currently set to the whole catalogue", which stopped
being true when Gaia landed. At 1920 x 1080 on a Ryzen 7700X:
- on the RTX 4080, the whole catalogue costs the same 6.1 ms a frame as the
budget;
- on the processor's two-core Radeon, standing in for an entry-level laptop,
every 100 000 stars costs about 4 ms: 112 fps at the budget, 44 at the
whole catalogue, and the same under WebGL2;
- drawn whole, the opening view turns into a grey wash that buries the
labels and the host rings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The star labels are refreshed every 0.2 s. Each pass filtered the whole
catalogue to the stars within the label radius, sorted them by magnitude,
and turned every one into a label object, all to place at most fifteen.
At the opening view the radius holds about 60 000 stars, so each pass was a
55-70 ms task on the main thread. A CPU profile of the opening view, on a
Ryzen 7700X with an RTX 4080, counted 29 tasks over 50 ms in 6.7 s, one
every 230 ms; updateLabels took 23% of the main thread. That is the stutter
the frame-time bench measured on every GPU and every render budget.
The catalogue is now sorted by brightness once, when it loads.
brightestWithin walks that order and hands stars over lazily, and
spreadLabels already stopped once it had placed fifteen labels, so a pass
reads only the stars it looks at. The output is the same as before: the
same stars, in the same order, with ties in catalogue order, the selected
star named wherever it is, and a star exactly on the radius included. The
spec checks it against the filter-then-sort it replaces. Stars are no longer
scanned at all when the view is at galactic scale, where the result was
thrown away.
Profiled again on the same view: 0 tasks over 50 ms, and the scene's
per-frame work over the window dropped from 2 028 ms to 342 ms.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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.
The route search widened evenly from the departure, Dijkstra-style, with a
budget of 20 000 stars. On the Gaia catalogue those are all within about
40 pc of the Sun, so it found no route to anything farther at any range:
Sol to Mirfak (155 pc) failed at 3, 8, 15 and 30 pc alike. Every failure
then asked minimumRangeBetween what range would work. That search widened
the same way with a 30 pc ceiling, and it ran for up to a minute on the
main thread before giving up with nothing.
routeBetween is now an A* search. Each star is queued by the distance
travelled to it plus the straight line on to the destination, on a binary
heap rather than a linear scan of the frontier. It heads for the
destination instead of flooding the core around the departure.
minimumRangeBetween bisects the range, one routeBetween per step, because
whether a chain exists can only become truer as the range grows. Its
answer is always the longest hop of a route actually found, so a range it
names always opens one. Its ceiling is now the Routes panel's own
maximum, MAX_JUMP_RANGE_PC: a range the control cannot be set to is no
answer, and raiseTo already clamped any figure above it.
The spatial index keys its cells by one number packed from their three
indices instead of an "ix,iy,iz" string. A search visits up to 125 cells
for every star it expands, and building those strings was half of what a
route cost. forEachWithin hands neighbours over unsorted and uncollected,
which was most of the other half; within is now that, gathered and sorted.
The no-route line said nothing in the catalogue bridged the gap; it now
says no chain of jumps up to the panel's maximum reaches the star, which
is what was searched.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The map had one way to read a distance: the Range readout, a number for how
far back the camera is. The local grid's five rings sat at 50 to 250 pc,
fixed and unlabelled. They said nothing from inside a 2 pc hop, and nothing
past 250 pc now that the Hipparcos stars Gaia places there are drawn.
A scale bar now sits under the scale rail. It shows the longest round length
(1, 2 or 5 x 10^n) that fits in 120 px, in AU inside a system and in parsecs
or kiloparsecs outside. It is measured at the depth the view is centred on,
since under perspective every depth has its own scale; under the plan view
it is exact everywhere.
The local grid's rings are now distances from the Sun, at a round step of
about a fifth of the camera's distance and out past the camera: 50 to 350 pc
from the opening view, 2 to 20 pc from twenty parsecs out. Each ring is
labelled with its distance, on the side facing what the view is centred on,
or across the far side of the grid when that is the Sun (the near side is
under the camera and out of frame). The survey edge at 250 pc stays called
out, as "Survey edge", whatever the step.
The rounding lives in one place, scale-bar.ts, shared by the bar and the
rings and tested there. Its formatter keeps three significant digits: one
digit, enough for the bar's round lengths, printed the 250 pc ring as
"300 pc".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
HYG and Gaia were both cut at 250 pc, each on its own distance. A star
Hipparcos put at 200 pc and Gaia at 300 was kept by the first, never
downloaded from the second, and drawn at 200. That is where 83% of the
9 691 mid-magnitude HYG stars without a Gaia counterpart came from, and at
the median Hipparcos had them a third too close. The mirror case, Hipparcos
outside and Gaia inside, dropped the HYG row and left its Gaia entry
anonymous.
Gaia's own Hipparcos cross-match (hipparcos2_best_neighbour, a fixed DR3
table of 99 525 rows) gives a usable Gaia distance for 97 751 of them.
placementDistancePc keeps a star either survey puts inside the cutoff, and
draws every kept star at the better measurement, inside the cutoff or not.
57 121 HYG stars now sit at Gaia's distance. 6 833 of them are past 250 pc:
Zet Per 230 -> 259 pc, 35 Ori 137 -> 330, 44 Cnc 223 -> 613, and the
farthest, HIP 69445, at 8.7 kpc. 3 666 stars that Hipparcos put outside are
now kept, and 3 656 of them give a Gaia entry its name.
The cross-match is required rather than skipped when unreachable. Without
it, every one of those stars would move back to its Hipparcos distance, and
the published map would flip with the archive's availability. The ESA TAP
answered it with a 500 at first and in 102 s on the next try. So fetches
now retry 5xx and network failures twice, after 30 s and 120 s, in the
fetch every source goes through. The refresh job also carries the Gaia DR3
responses from run to run in the Actions cache: the release is frozen, and
a live re-fetch has already reproduced stars.bin byte for byte.
423 651 stars (+10), 61 168 HYG rows folded into Gaia entries (+3 656),
351 597 unnamed designations (-3 656). 10 886 HYG survivors and 23 unmerged
pairs under an arcsecond, both inside the merge gate's ceilings. The same
1 972 exoplanets have a host; KELT-4 A b and MWC 758 c now sit on their
named star.
The HUD's "Radius" becomes "Survey radius": 250 pc is where Gaia is
surveyed to, and no longer the edge of the map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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
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
Three guards the matcher was missing, none of which changes a byte of the
regenerated data — the ETL re-run after them is identical — and all three
now have a test that fails without them.
A proper motion that is not a number poisoned every comparison rather than
one: NaN loses every `<` it appears in, so `cosine < minCosine` was false
for every star, each one reached the distance guard, and the last one in
catalogue order won — a confident wrong answer, order-dependent, where the
honest answer is "no match". The archive's own parser never produces one
(parseOptionalNumber maps a blank cell to undefined), but the matcher is
exported for offline re-cross-referencing and a caller reaching for bare
Number() is exactly the coercion the CSV helper documents as having caused
two prior bugs. An unusable motion now reads as no motion.
Normalizing a name strips the dot, so `Gl 55.2` and `Gl 552` — two stars
135 degrees apart — share one key, and the index kept whichever came last;
64 such groups exist in the catalogue, among them `Gl 84.1A`/`Gl 841A` and
`HD 96600` twice. A name that names two stars names neither, so ambiguous
keys are dropped and the query goes to the sky, where direction settles it.
No archive hostname lands on one today, which is why the data is unchanged.
And the cache is keyed by the whole request rather than the query alone,
here and in gaia.ts: fetchTextCached records only that some response
arrived, so an endpoint edit would have kept serving the old host's bytes —
the same silent staleness the query hash was added to close.
The tests now discriminate what the comments claim. Eight mutants, each
caught: judging only the published position, only the carried-back one,
judging each star on its worse epoch rather than its better, letting a
distance-rejected star claim best-so-far and shadow the true host behind
it, an unguarded proper motion, a last-wins name index, a fixed angular
tolerance instead of a transverse one, and no distance guard at all. The
GJ 887 test grew a decoy standing halfway along the star's own track: it is
nearer than Lacaille 9352 at the published position and nearer at the worse
of the two epochs, so it wins unless both epochs are tried and the better
one decides — the property the test's comment had been claiming untested.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The 2026-09-07 "Refresh the astronomical catalogues" commit regenerated
exoplanets.json and stars-index.json on main with the merge this branch
fixes, so both sides touched both files. Resolved by keeping this branch's:
they are the output of the reviewed pipeline, and the one substantive thing
main's side carried — the HYG designation-prefix casing from 7a112e4 — is
code, not data, which this branch already regenerated with. What is
genuinely newer on main's side is eight planets the archive published after
this branch's fetch; the next scheduled refresh re-fetches the live archive
with the fixed pipeline and brings them back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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
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.
Three findings from the adversarial review of the merge, all reproduced.
The distance test was hiding 1 489 stars that sit under an arcsecond from
their Gaia entry with a Hipparcos parallax off by half — thirty of them at a
false few parsecs from the Sun (HIP 82724 at 3.7 pc, where Gaia has it at
62.8) — and the first audit did not see them because it counted residual
doubles through the same 50 % filter. Under three arcseconds the distances
are now not consulted: a coincidence of direction that close is never chance
at this depth (the quarter-degree shift finds none), and the parallax is the
thing to fix. Brightness keeps its say at any separation, and is now
one-sided: a folded entry may be five magnitudes fainter (a red dwarf in V
against G) but not one brighter, because an entry a magnitude brighter than
what is already at that spot is a primary Gaia does not carry — Almach,
Alfirk and Ashlesha had all been folded into their companions' entries,
93 in all. The sky grid wraps at 0h.
The Gaia query orders by source_id after G, so the row order — and the ids
assigned from it — is a function of the archive's content rather than of the
server's plan for 20 064 ties; the cache key is a hash of the query.
And a bookmark to a star id the catalogue no longer holds — 56 000 Gaia ids
change with this — sent the scene through reconcileSelection, enterSystem,
its decline, finishTransition and reconcileSelection again until the stack
overflowed. The selection is cleared instead, at the one place every path
goes through.
Regenerated: 423 641 stars, 57 512 HYG identities on Gaia positions, no HYG
id or name lost, no star within 20 pc left with an unclaimed Gaia entry under
an arcsecond. 403 HYG survivors still have an unclaimed Gaia entry within
60": 13 under an arcsecond, where the brightness guard does not trust HYG's
magnitude, and the rest components 3" to 60" from their counterpart.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QL6F9Bgfh8SgAiAAcPB9Hw
Gaia DR3 gives positions for J2016.0, HYG for 2000.0, and the merge matched
them on the sky to one arcsecond without propagating any proper motion.
Sixteen years of motion is 62" for Proxima and 166" for Barnard's Star, so
every star faster than ~62 mas/yr — most of the nearest ones — was kept twice,
some 23 000 in all. The slow ones were matched, and lost: the merge kept
Gaia's row whole, so 102 proper names, 1 336 Bayer/Flamsteed names and
32 000 spectral types became "Gaia DR3 <id>" and "Unknown", and 92 named
exoplanet hosts handed their planets to their anonymous twin.
Gaia is now asked for its proper motions and carried back to J2000 before it
leaves the fetcher. HYG is placed from its own x/y/z columns, which are right
where its `ra` is not: that column was carried from the Hipparcos epoch
without the cos δ its motion needs, 17.9" off for Proxima. A match combines
the two entries — Gaia's position, HYG's name, type, magnitude, colour and id
— instead of choosing one. The tolerance is 15" with a five-magnitude guard,
both set by measurement: 55 457 pairs sit under 1" once the epochs agree, the
Gliese-only entries up to 12" (Ross 248), shifting every entry a quarter of
a degree finds 16 chance neighbours at 15", and the guard keeps Sirius out
of Sirius B's entry. Entries of one source are never merged with each other:
the 1 411 Gaia doubles resolved under 1" are two stars, not one.
Regenerated: 425 071 stars (was 447 410), 56 082 of them Gaia positions
carrying HYG identities; no HYG id or name lost; the sixteen stars nearest
the Sun carry no survey designation; 196 residual doubles, all components
17" or more from their counterpart. Five planets of four bright giants
(7 CMa, HD 81688, omi UMa, xi Aql) lose their host link: their Gaia distance
sits 0.7–1.1 pc from the archive's Hipparcos-based one, past the 0.5 pc the
host match allows. Matching hosts on the sky rather than in space, as the
merge does, is the follow-up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01QL6F9Bgfh8SgAiAAcPB9Hw
Junie: a HYG star that fell all the way through the ETL's naming chain --
no proper name, Bayer, Flamsteed, HD, Gliese or HIP -- is called "HYG <id>",
and with `source: 'hyg'` the predicate was looking for a lower-case "hyg "
prefix and calling it named. None in the current catalogue, but the path is
in `tools/etl/fetchStars.ts` and a refresh could walk it.
Fixed in the table rather than in the predicate: `hyg: 'HYG'` next to
`gaia: 'Gaia DR3'`, so the encoder, the decoder and the predicate all read the
one rule. The sourceless case reads the same entry instead of repeating it.
npm test 609/609, build and ETL typecheck clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
The neighbour ring exists to say where you are. Since the catalogue refresh it
has been spending one of its four places in Sol on "Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696"
-- a nineteen-digit survey id for the star printed beside it as Proxima
Centauri, the same star twice -- and that duplicate row pushed Barnard's Star
off the ring altogether. 91.9% of the refreshed catalogue is named that way.
Named stars now come first, and survey designations fill in only where fewer
than four named ones are in reach. The line between the two is the one the
catalogue format already draws: a name is a designation when it is what the
star's source would generate for it. Judged by the prefix rather than by
rebuilding "prefix id" from the row, because the number after "Gaia DR3" is the
survey's own id, which the 32-bit row id cannot hold -- a round trip through
the id would have called every one of those stars named.
The preference lives on the index as `nearestPreferring`: the preferred pass
exhausts the search before the fill runs, so a named star is never outranked by
a nearer unnamed one. That is the whole point of asking.
The end-to-end spec names Barnard's Star again, on purpose. The four nearest
named stars to the Sun are a fact about space, not about which catalogue was
refreshed last, and without this change that is exactly the label that
vanished -- checked by running the spec with the preference stashed: it fails
on that line, and passes with it back.
npm test 609/609, npx playwright test 16/16 under CI=true --workers=2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
The scheduled refresh on 24 August took the star catalogue from 68 388 rows to
447 410 and from 820 kB to 5.4 MB. No branch in the seven-PR chain had ever seen
it -- they were all cut before -- so nothing tested the combination until the
chain landed on main. Two things broke there.
The neighbour ring named Barnard's Star, and the spec clicked it by name. The
refresh is a Gaia DR3 merge that carries the same physical star twice: Proxima
Centauri at 1.296 pc and Gaia DR3 5853498713190525696 at 1.302 pc are one star,
as are Barnard's Star at 1.824 and Gaia DR3 4472832130942575872 at 1.828. The
extra row pushed Barnard's from fourth-nearest to fifth, off a ring that shows
four. The ring is doing exactly what it says; the spec was asserting the
catalogue's contents. It now reads whichever star the ring names and follows
that one, so the next refresh cannot demote it.
Four other assertions were timing out at Playwright's default five seconds --
not because anything was wrong, but because every one of these tests boots that
catalogue and the suite boots several at once on a software rasterizer. The
heavy waits already carried explicit longer timeouts; the default now matches.
Capping the worker count would have worked too, and would have cost every run
the time whether or not the machine needed it.
npm test 607/607, npx playwright test 16/16 at the default worker count.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014fcUfL82nvyh9VebX1Fz6w
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.
Two more findings against this projection, both of the same shape as the last
two: something written to the camera that happens to be live, where the plan
view derives from the other one.
The system's own depth range — a near plane a five-hundredth of an
astronomical unit out, a far plane twenty thousand — was set on the active
camera. Entering a system with the plan view already on therefore wrote it to
a camera that re-derives near and far from the perspective one every frame, so
the range never applied and the system clipped. All three unit-space depth
writes go to the perspective camera now, which is the one they are reasoned in.
And the ring of neighbour names collapsed toward the middle of the frame. Its
placement unprojected a point on the ring, treated the offset from the camera
as a direction, and stepped a fixed distance along it — which is a perspective
construction. A parallel projection has no vanishing point to step towards:
every ray through the frame is the view direction, so normalising threw the
sideways part away. Measured before and after, from inside Sol: the two names
sat 319 and 335 pixels out under perspective, 104 and gone under the plan, and
323 and 335 with the unprojected point used as what it already is.
Verified: build clean, 596/596 unit, 16/16 end-to-end on the branch this merges
into, and the ring measured on both projections.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Two findings, and the first is the kind a person does not catch.
The article cache keyed on `${name}\0${qualifier}` — with the null byte written
into the file rather than escaped into the string. Git calls a file with one of
those binary and stops diffing it, and every editor between here and a reader
does something different with it. The separator was the right idea, because a
name can contain a space and `("Kepler-22 b", none)` and `("Kepler-22", "b")`
are different questions; it just has to be spelled `\0`.
And `navigator.language` is optional in the DOM's own typings and missing in
some embedded engines, where splitting it would have thrown on the first press
of About rather than falling back to English.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5