Commit Graph
14 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 d9bd913458 Draw it flat: an orthographic plan view
A perspective camera leans everything away from the centre of the frame. In a
system that means the orbits are ellipses whose shape depends on where they
happen to sit on screen, so two planets on the same circular orbit do not look
like they are on the same circle. Plan view, in the Display panel, swaps the
projection for a parallel one and swings to look down the plane the current
scale is read against — the galactic plane out in the field, this system's own
orbital plane inside one. Circles are circles again, wherever they are.

Both halves are the feature and neither alone is it. The projection is what
makes the shape honest; the swing is what makes it worth looking at. Orbiting
still works afterwards, so a plan is where the view starts rather than a cage.

The engine now holds both cameras and keeps them in step, rather than making
one on demand: a camera that exists only while it is being looked through is a
camera whose pose is always one swap out of date. The orthographic frustum is
derived, never stored — it is the perspective camera's own frustum at the
current orbit distance, made parallel — which is why the camera flights work
through it untouched. They move the camera; the frame follows.

Three things had to be taught that a projection had changed.

Sprites. three.js turns an angular size into a world size only when it is
compiling against a perspective camera (SpriteNodeMaterial: `camera
.isPerspectiveCamera && sizeAttenuation === false`). Under a parallel one that
step is silently skipped and every star in the field collapses to a thousandth
of a parsec. The same arithmetic is now done in the node graph behind a
uniform, so one material serves both cameras without being recompiled — and
picking follows it exactly, since a star has to be clickable where it is drawn.

Depth. A parallel camera does not back away as its frame grows, so at galactic
framing the backdrop shell and half the Milky Way sit behind its own plane. Its
depth range is symmetric about it instead, which a linear depth buffer can
afford and a perspective one could not.

And distance. Half the map was keyed on how far back the camera was pulled —
the scale ladder, the crossfade, the label radius, the range readout — which
under a parallel projection says nothing at all, because the frustum sets the
extent. They all read one honest equivalent now: the distance a perspective
camera would need to frame the same thing.

Two defects found while verifying, both mine, both from this change:

The per-frame work was computed against the camera captured at bootstrap while
the renderer drew through the other one, so after a swap every label was
projected by a camera nobody was looking through.

And the zoom limits were derived from the orbit limits, which are in whichever
unit space the view is in. Reading them on the frame the scene swaps parsecs
for astronomical units pinned the zoom at the ratio between the two, and
leaving a system landed the view three kiloparsecs out. Zoom is a plain
multiplier on a frame the distance already sets, so it is bounded by a factor.

Verified: build clean, 595/595 unit including a new spec for the projection
arithmetic, 13/13 end-to-end including two that flatten a system and check the
ladder still knows how far out it is, design detector clean, screenshots of
both scales in both projections.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-20 20:11:31 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 307fd41be8 Keep a place, and come back to it
Restores the commit reverted off the routing branch, which is where it was
committed by mistake. The change is unmodified; only its branch is.

The map had no memory. Every visit started at the same overview, and a system
worth returning to had to be found again by name each time. A mark on the
readout and on a body's panel now keeps it, a Bookmarks tab lists what has been
kept, and choosing one goes there — a star by flying into its system, a body by
opening its page.

Local storage, not an account. This map asks nobody to sign in, and a list of
stars somebody liked is not worth a server. Every read of that store is
defensive, because it is a string a person can edit, another tab can write, and
a browser can refuse to hand over at all: a bad entry is skipped rather than
losing the rest, duplicates are collapsed since two entries for one place would
each toggle the other's control, the list is bounded so a hand-edited store
cannot decide how much this renders, and where storage is denied outright the
bookmarks still work for the visit — they just do not outlive it.

The name is stored alongside the id rather than looked up, so the list reads
before the catalogues have loaded, and a bookmark to something a later
catalogue no longer holds still says what it was instead of decaying into a
bare number.

The tab is offered even when it is empty, and says what the mark does: a tab
that appears only once you have already found the feature is a tab that never
taught anyone anything.

Choosing a kept place hands the panel back to the readout, the same move as
choosing a search result and for the same reason. That behaviour is what the
end-to-end spec caught missing — the readout it asserted on did not exist,
because the panel just used was still covering it.

Verified: build clean, 587/587 unit, 11/11 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at 1440x900 and 390x844.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-20 19:12:58 +02:00
Senrokai 9cdd8f9388 Revert "Keep a place, and come back to it"
This reverts commit bd3a5a4. The bookmarks work was committed onto this branch
by mistake — it belongs to its own pull request, and it has one, branched from
this branch's own tip. Reverting rather than rewinding because the branch is
published and a pull request is open against it: the diff this pull request
shows is what matters, and after this it shows the routing change alone.
2026-08-20 19:10:24 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 bd3a5a48c9 Keep a place, and come back to it
The map had no memory. Every visit started at the same overview, and a system
worth returning to had to be found again by name each time. A mark on the
readout and on a body's panel now keeps it, a Bookmarks tab lists what has
been kept, and choosing one goes there — a star by flying into its system, a
body by opening its page.

Local storage, not an account. This map asks nobody to sign in, and a list of
stars somebody liked is not worth a server. Every read of that store is
defensive, because it is a string a person can edit, another tab can write,
and a browser can refuse to hand over at all: a bad entry is skipped rather
than losing the rest, duplicates are collapsed since two entries for one place
would each toggle the other's control, the list is bounded so a hand-edited
store cannot decide how much this renders, and where storage is denied
outright the bookmarks still work for the visit — they just do not outlive it.

The name is stored alongside the id rather than looked up. That way the list
reads before the catalogues have loaded, and a bookmark to something a later
catalogue no longer holds still says what it was instead of decaying into a
bare number.

The tab is offered even when it is empty, and says what the mark does. A tab
that appears only once you have already found the feature is a tab that never
taught anyone anything.

Choosing a kept place hands the panel back to the readout, which is the same
move as choosing a search result and for the same reason: the panel has done
its job and the thing to look at is now the scene. That behaviour is what the
end-to-end spec caught missing — the readout it asserted on did not exist,
because the panel that had just been used was still covering it.

Verified: build clean, 587/587 unit, 11/11 end-to-end including a spec that
keeps Earth, leaves the page, comes back to it from the list and forgets it,
and one that keeps Proxima Centauri, flies out to the field and flies back in
by what was kept. Design detector clean, screenshots at 1440x900 and 390x844.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-20 19:07:46 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 68a919bd84 Route between stars, through the crossings a chosen range allows
The map could say where a star is and what is near it, and nothing about
getting from one to another. This adds the question and the answer: pick a
departure and a destination, choose how far a single crossing may be, and get
the chain — how many jumps, how far in total, and every star on the way, each
one a step you can fly to.

A jump link is not a feature of space. There are no corridors out there; a
link is a question asked of the catalogue, which is why the range is the
user's control rather than a constant. Two facts about that catalogue decide
what the answers look like, and both are stated in the code because they read
as defects otherwise. It is magnitude-limited, so it is dense around the Sun
and thins with distance — within 50 pc a 3 pc range links 99% of it into one
piece, while over the whole 250 pc reach the same range leaves most stars
alone. And a gap in it is a gap in what has been catalogued, not in what is
there.

That is why "no route" is not the end of the answer. Where no chain exists at
the range asked for, the panel says which range would open one — the chain
whose longest hop is as short as possible, found by the same search with the
cost of arriving somewhere being the worst hop taken rather than the sum — and
offers that number as a control to accept.

Departure defaults to wherever the view already is, so one field is usually
enough. Sol to Vega at 3 pc: four jumps, 10 pc, by way of Barnard's Star,
Struve 2398 B and HD 155876. Narrow it to 0.8 pc and it says 2.26 would reach.

The graph is drawn as one buffer of line segments and the route as a second,
brighter one over it, with the graph stepping back while a route is up: near
the Sun the links are a haze, and a thread through a bright cloud is not a
thread. Both fade out with the local layer, since from outside the Galaxy the
graph is a smear.

Two measurements shaped this. Asking the index for each star's neighbours in
turn — sixty-eight thousand sorted lists, thrown away — took eight seconds; the
grid now walks its own cells once and pairs them, which takes a quarter of one.
And the range control emits per pixel dragged, so the rebuild waits for the
hand to settle.

Three defects fixed on the way, all older than the routing:

hud-acquire animated with fill-mode `both`, which leaves its closing keyframe
applied for good — and that keyframe carries a clip-path. Every panel wearing
it has been clipping its own box ever since, so anything that had to escape
one was cut away and could not even be clicked. Nothing had needed to escape
until this panel's dropdown opened upward.

The routing fields returned nothing when typed into before the catalogue
finished loading, and stayed nothing until the next keystroke. The options are
derived from the query and the index together now, so they appear when the
second of the two arrives, whichever that is.

And a link was `3-7` walking one way and `7-3` walking the other, which is two
links to anything comparing them.

Verified: build clean, 571/571 unit, 9/9 end-to-end including two new specs —
one plotting Sol to Sirius, one narrowing the range until there is no route and
accepting the one it names — design detector clean, screenshots at 1440x900
and 390x844.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-20 18:39:22 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 44c6a1f15e Name the neighbours, from inside the system
A system view could say everything about the star it was inside and nothing
about where that star was. The four nearest catalogue stars are now named
around the edge of it, each with its distance, each a button that flies there
— so a chain of neighbours can be walked without pulling back out to the field
between hops.

These are bearings, not sky positions, and that is the one deliberate
compromise here. A true direction was tried first and does not work: at this
field of view the visible cone is about 30 degrees, so on average one
neighbour in fifteen falls inside the frame — measured, not guessed, at one
label of four in Sol and none at all after a small orbit. What survives the
ring is the half of the direction a viewer can act on, which way to turn to
face it, and the ring reads as instrument rather than as scene because it sits
at a fixed radius. Real distance was never an option: Proxima is 268 000 AU
from Sol, thirteen far planes out, so the distance goes on the type line.

Proximity is answered by a new pure module rather than by a scan. A uniform
grid over the catalogue answers both "the k nearest to this star" and "every
star within n parsecs", the second being what the jump-link graph in the next
PR is built from — one scan per node, and the quadratic would show. Its spec
pins the grid against a brute-force sweep of a pseudo-random cloud, because a
spatial index is an optimisation and never a different answer.

Where the ring meets the HUD, the HUD wins: placement is given the boxes the
readout, the strip and the object card occupy, and slides a name along the
ring until it clears them, or drops it rather than print it half hidden. That
rule is a pure function with its own spec.

Four defects found while verifying this, three of them older than it:

The dock's flex column was pointer-events-auto and as wide as its strip, so
an invisible band above the strip swallowed every click in it — including,
but not only, a neighbour's. The column is transparent now and each surface
opts back in.

The ring was sized against the frame's height alone, which on a phone held
upright put it a viewport and a half wide: no neighbour was reachable on any
portrait screen. It is sized against the shorter side.

Picking a search result reopened the readout, which on a narrow viewport is a
sheet over most of the scene — reopening it onto whatever was just flown to.
Below sm it now folds away.

A selectable label's two lines are adjacent spans, so it announced as
"Sirius2.64 pc"; it carries an explicit label saying what it does.

Verified: build clean, 558/558 unit, 7/7 end-to-end including a new spec that
flies Sol to Barnard's Star by its label, design detector clean, screenshots
at 1440x900 and 390x844 in Sol and Proxima Centauri, and the keyboard path
walked: both names are in the tab order, focusable, with the accent ring.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-20 17:06:25 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 8b507427d8 Answer the review: sky toggles in system view too, one media query, idempotent openSearch
Three findings from the automated review, all confirmed before acting.

The Sky toggle did nothing in system view. Its write lived only in the galaxy
crossfade, which the tick parks while the system group is up — and the sky is
still on screen there. It is now also written on toggle, in applyDisplay. The
suggested form of that fix crashed the scene on mount: the effect that calls
applyDisplay fires once at construction, before the engine has a scene, and
getScene() throws — the dock rendered no tabs at all. Guarded on
engine.isInitialized; verified with a screenshot of Proxima with the sky off.

isWideViewport built a fresh MediaQueryList on every document pointer-down;
one module-level query is read instead. And openSearch in the e2e support
clicked the Search tab unconditionally, which would fold it closed if a test
ever called it while already open; it now checks aria-selected first.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-18 21:35:52 +02:00
SenrokaiandClaude Fable 5 4a1cc5240a Dock the HUD: every tool and readout on one rail along the bottom
The overlay had grown by accretion: a search box floating top-centre, a
readout panel bottom-left, a range readout bottom-right, and nothing that
said these were parts of one instrument. This puts them on one rail across
the bottom of the viewport — the dock — with a tab strip pinned to the bottom
edge and whichever panel is open growing upward from it. The top of the
screen keeps only the scale ladder and the nameplate, so the map itself is
what fills the frame.

Three tabs. SEARCH is the old search, with its field pinned to the bottom of
the panel and the results growing upward above it, so the thing being typed
into never moves while the list grows. READOUT is the old bottom-left panel.
DISPLAY is new: five layer toggles — labels, orbits, grid, deep sky, sky —
each a real scene object switched by visibility, except the ones the galaxy
crossfade already rewrites every frame, whose toggles fold into that
crossfade instead of fighting it. The range readout sits on the strip itself,
so it is readable whatever is open.

Behaviour worth stating: choosing a search result hands the panel straight
back to the readout, since the thing to look at is now the scene. `/` opens
the search from anywhere. Below `sm` the dock is the strip alone; a tap opens
a panel as a sheet, a tap on the scene folds it away. The body-detail page
gets the same dock with only the search — the info panel is its reading.

Two things found on the way. CSS2DRenderer gives every label its own
z-index for depth order, and the label host created no stacking context, so
labels painted over every HUD panel; `isolate` on the host keeps them under.
And starmap-hud's readout tests were really tests of the panel that moved,
so they moved with it.

Verified: build clean, 535/535 unit, 6/6 end-to-end, design detector clean,
screenshots at 1440×900 and 390×844 across galaxy, galactic, system,
body-detail, all three tabs and the layers-off state.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
2026-08-18 20:57:10 +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 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 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 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 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