5333be6 gave the star card an estimated type for the 383 695 stars the ETL files as "Unknown",
but search rows, the route search index and the current-star route option still printed that
literal: TRAPPIST-1 read "STAR · UNKNOWN" in search beside "Spectral type ~M8, from colour" on its
card, audit #17's own symptom. spectralClassification (spectral.ts) now gives the catalogue's type,
else the colour's marked "~", else nothing, and all three and the card's subtitle use it; a search
row with nothing to add prints its kind alone rather than a trailing " · ".
The neighbourhood note still read "Positions from measured parallaxes" after 4c8e4a0 placed 3 277
stars at the Exoplanet Archive's sy_dist, 343 of them without a usable parallax and 281 of those
past 1 kpc — microlensing hosts such as OGLE-2005-BLG-390L at 6.6 kpc, from a lensing model.
positionsNote now says so, with the count. Neither the note nor the census subtitle (audit #16) had
a test: putting back "Hipparcos · Yale Bright Star · Gliese" passed all 775.
In the app on :4302: the note reads "Positions from measured parallaxes, and for the 3,277 planet
hosts only the NASA Exoplanet Archive places, from its distances. Grid marks the galactic plane
through the Sun."; search reads "TRAPPIST-1 STAR · ~M8", "OGLE-2005-BLG-390L STAR", "Sirius STAR ·
A0M"; TRAPPIST-1's route option has subtitle "~M8".
The scene spec gains an archive-placed fixture star. Controls, each failing its named test: the
search row printing the raw type, keeping the separator with nothing after it, the route index
and the current-star option printing the raw type, the note back to parallaxes only, the subtitle
back to the old catalogue list (1 of 797 each), the note never counting the archive (2 of 797),
and the classification without its estimate (3 of 797).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
colorIndexToRgb maps a B−V onto the star field's tint ramp, and its one caller passed it every
star's colour index, whatever colorSystem said. BP−RP is the larger of the two for the same star —
0.823 against 0.65 for a G2 dwarf, 1.84 against 1.42 for an M0 (Pecaut & Mamajek) — so the 376 703
stars measured in it, 83 % of the catalogue, were tinted as later types than they are, and redder
than HYG's stars of the same type, and than their own disc in the system view.
A BP−RP is now carried to the B−V of the dwarf sequence at that colour (the table's own B−V
column, which DwarfSequencePoint now returns, clamped at its ends), then tinted as before. The
median Gaia colour, BP−RP 0.883, a G7 dwarf, read as a K2: its tint goes from (1, 0.972, 0.955) to
(0.975, 0.982, 1), the same as HYG's G7 stars.
Controls, each failing its named test: BP−RP read as B−V (2 of 792 failed), the star field not
passing the colour system (1 of 792), and the B−V taken from the wrong column (3 of 792).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
formatDistance printed any error of a fifth or more as the range a parallax's error makes,
d/(1+e) to d/(1−e). A star the ETL places from the Exoplanet Archive carries the mean of sy_disterr1
and 2 instead, which the archive defines as one-sided errors on sy_dist in parsecs, and many of
those distances come from a lensing model with no parallax behind them. 129 of the 3 195 archive
stars with an error were printed as ranges the archive does not give: KMT-2016-BLG-1836L as 5.8 to
9.2 kpc, where the archive publishes 7 100 +800 −2 400 pc, and AT2021ueyL as 664 pc to 2.4 kpc
against 1 040 +740 −440.
The card now tells formatDistance when the error is on the distance (source exoplanet-archive), and
it keeps the ± at any size. Measured on the shipped catalogue: KMT-2016-BLG-1836L reads 7.1 ± 1.6 kpc,
AT2021ueyL 1.0 ± 0.6 kpc, EPIC 201170410 134 ± 43 pc, KMT-2016-BLG-0212L 6.3 ± 1.3 kpc. The ETL keeps
only the mean, so a lopsided interval such as KMT-2016-BLG-1836L's is shown symmetric; carrying both
errors would take a second column in stars-meta.bin. The doc comments on formatDistance and on
distanceError no longer say an archive distance is an inverted parallax.
Controls, each failing its named test: the error on the distance read as a parallax's (2 of 790
failed), and the card not saying it is on the distance (1 of 790).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The system view names a star's neighbours on a ring at 0.74 of the view's tighter half-extent,
whatever the star. A giant was framed to fill the frame, 2.4 radii out, which the three-radius
closest approach then overrode, so it settled at 3 radii with its disc projecting to 0.758 of the
half-extent: in the app, Betelgeuse's disc was 379 px on a 1 000 px view against the 370 px ring,
and HD 39374 and HD 38118 were printed on it at about 1.3:1 contrast.
The star's term in the framing distance now places its silhouette, asin(R / d), at half the
tighter half-extent, which puts the camera 4.4 radii out on a 50° view. Measured on :4302 at
1600 by 1000: Betelgeuse settles at 13.9 AU (closest approach 9.5) with a 250 px disc and Antares at
14.1 AU; the nearest corner of any neighbour's name is 292 px from the centre, so none is on
either disc (it was two and one of them before). Closing in to the closest approach can still bring
the disc over the names; that is the viewer's choice, not the arrival's.
This also gives the star's term a job: at 2.4 radii it never exceeded the closest approach, so
dropping it changed nothing (the previous commit's one surviving control). Controls, each failing
its named test: the star left out of the framing (1 of 788 failed), the star framed to fill the
frame (2 of 788), and the disc taken as flat (1 of 788).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The system view drew every star without a radius at the Sun's radius, and every star without a
temperature in the Sun's colour. PSR J1719-1438, a neutron star 10 km across, came out 1 R☉ wide,
wider than its planet's 0.0044 AU orbit, and b spent nine tenths of its orbit inside it; Procyon B,
a white dwarf of 0.012 R☉ with a type the parser does not read and no colour, was a Sun 81 times
too wide in the Sun's colour.
Such a star is now drawn at 150 km, under the three-pixel floor from anywhere the camera can go, so
the floor's point is what shows, and its disc keeps the photograph's own grey instead of the Sun's
tint. Its light stays white, which is the photographs' own light rather than a claim about the
star. 2 858 stars take this after the clamping in the previous commit, against 3 077 drawn at the
Sun's radius before it.
In the app on :4302: PSR J1719-1438's star is drawn at 1.7×10⁻⁴ AU (the floor, 168 times its
geometry) with b 0.00417 AU from its centre, outside it; Gl 280B at the floor, tint (1, 1, 1) and no
radius on its card; Proxima at 0.141 R☉, tint (1, 0.459, 0.135), light (1, 0.523, 0.165), card
"Luminosity 0.002 L☉" unmarked and "Radius 0.141 solar radii".
The scene's use of the star's surface had no test: every star in the scene spec was drawn at the
Sun's radius, and drawing all of them so, lighting planets white, tinting every disc as the Sun or
closing the camera to the Sun's clearance all passed. The spec now gives Proxima its planet's
archive row and adds Antares and Procyon B, and three tests enter them. Controls, each failing its
named test: every star at the Sun's radius (3 of 787 failed), an unmeasured one at it, the light
without the temperature, the closest approach for the Sun, the Sun's tint for a host, the Sun's tint
for a star without a temperature, and the card without the surface (1 of 787 each). Dropping the
star from the framing distance was not caught: its term, 2.4 radii, never exceeds the three-radius
closest approach the camera is clamped to, so it cannot change where the camera settles.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
dwarfSequenceAtColor answers null outside Pecaut & Mamajek's table, B−V −0.301 to 2.16 and BP−RP
−0.12 to 5.1, and effectiveTemperatureK then fell back on the type, which Gaia's stars do not have
and carbon stars' parser does not read. 219 stars with a measured colour got no temperature and so
no radius, and were drawn at the Sun's radius in the Sun's colour: 110 white dwarfs within 50 pc,
38 Gaia stars redder than BP−RP 5.1 (Gaia DR3 6439125097427143808, an ultracool dwarf 4.0 pc away),
HD 46687, La Superba and the other carbon stars, and an O8 star.
Past the table, the colour is now read at the row it is past (clampToTable), but only for a star
with no readable type: beside a type an off-table colour is more often the bad measurement — HD
49748 is G5 V at B−V −0.32 — so the type still wins there, as it did. The luminosity reads the same
point, so a star past the red end also gets the M8.5 row's G−V and correction. A type's own colour
past the table, which only O types have, is read at B0. Carbon and S stars (C, N, R, S) now count
as giants, so their correction stays their type's, not an M8.5 dwarf's −5.78.
Measured on the shipped catalogue: stars without a temperature 3 053 -> 2 834, without a radius
3 077 -> 2 858; all 292 stars with an off-table colour now have a temperature, against 73. Gaia DR3
6439125097427143808 is 2 420 K and 0.110 R☉ (M8.5 V: 0.104); the 110 white dwarfs a median 0.018 R☉
at 10 700 K (0.0013 to 0.034); HD 46687 212 R☉ at 2 420 K and La Superba 133; audit #16's Gaia DR3
5612323414549657984, k1 Pup, B6 V at BP−RP −0.15, 203 L☉ and 4.1 R☉ against 143 and none (FLAME
gives 336 and 3.49). The 2 851 stars left without a radius have neither a colour nor a readable
type, or no band.
Controls, each failing its named test: no clamp for an untyped star (2 of 784 failed), the clamp
winning over a type, an O type's colour unclamped, the luminosity off the unclamped sequence, and
carbon stars not counted as giants (1 of 784 each); clampToTable ignored (3 of 784).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
3392f06 read every star's bolometric correction off the dwarf sequence at its colour, so a giant
got the correction of the cooler dwarf of that colour, which is larger. Antares, M1 Ib at B−V 1.87,
took an M5 dwarf's −3.26 and came out 172 023 L☉ and 1 516 R☉, a 7.06 AU sphere, against the 680 R☉
Ohnaka et al. (2013) measure; 119 Tau 2 838 against 587, Menkar 204 against 89.
isGiant (spectral.ts) reads luminosity class I to III off a type's primary component, or HYG's g
and c prefixes, and a giant keeps its type's correction. Drawn radius against the published one
(no planets, so derived), before and after: Antares 2.23 -> 1.01, 119 Tau 4.84 -> 1.43, Menkar 2.29
-> 1.80, Scheat 1.92 -> 1.42, Aldebaran 1.95 -> 1.10, Mirach 1.96 -> 1.27, 41 Com 2.14 -> 1.56;
Betelgeuse 0.76 -> 0.89. It is not better everywhere: Gacrux goes from 1.23 to 1.40 and Arcturus
from 1.02 to 0.88. 10 808 stars have a giant's type, 10 794 of them a colour. Against the archive's
own luminosity for the 130 giant hosts, the median error moves from 0.038 to 0.052 dex and the 90th
percentile from 0.246 to 0.204; 17 are off by over 1.5 times, against 19.
Controls, each failing its named test (1 of 781): the giant given the dwarf's correction, a giant
companion read as the primary, a IV read as a I, and the prefixes ignored.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The ETL has carried each host's st_lum since 494fb56 and nothing read it: the card, the system
view's planet temperatures and the body pages all derived a luminosity from the star's magnitude
and colour. For 757 of the 4 440 hosts the archive gives one for, the two differ by more than
1.5 times, 667 of them stars the ETL placed from the archive's own V and B−V. Proxima read
8.9×10⁻⁴ L☉ beside the archive's radius and temperature, which imply 1.27×10⁻³; the archive gives
1.51×10⁻³, as Ribas et al. 2017 do.
starSurfaceOf now returns the luminosity with the radius and temperature, taken from the first of
the host's planets that gives one, as st_rad and st_teff already are, and derived only otherwise.
The system view lights its planets with it, the body page uses the same host rule, and the card
marks it derived only when it is. The derived radius still comes from the derived luminosity, so
its "from colour and brightness" stays true; only 3 hosts have st_lum and no st_rad.
Measured on the shipped catalogue against the parent commit: 544 of 3 639 planets with an
equilibrium temperature move by more than 10 %, and 98 change class. Kepler-186 f goes from a 292 K
rocky world to a 175 K icy one, LHS 1140 b from 152 K icy to 206 K temperate, LTT 1445 A b from
298 K rocky to 402 K scorched, Proxima Cen b from 200 to 228 K and d from 259 to 296 K.
starReadouts now takes the surface alone, which carries the luminosity. Controls, each failing its
named test: the archive's luminosity ignored (2 of 778 failed), called derived, the body page
warmed by the derived one, the body page reading the planet's own row only, and the card marking
a published luminosity derived (1 of 778 each).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
luminosityOf derived a luminosity from any magnitude, including the stand-in the ETL writes for
the 309 stars with neither a V nor a G. starSurfaceOf already refused it for the radius; the card,
the system view's planet appearances and the body pages did not. The 265 archive hosts among them
came out at a median 33 L☉: KMT-2016-BLG-1107L, a 0.087 M☉ star, at 36.8, and OGLE-2005-BLG-390L b,
published at about 50 K, read 388 K and a sub-Neptune. Their cards printed "Magnitude: Not
measured" beside a luminosity derived from that magnitude.
The guard now sits in luminosityOf, which every caller goes through, so the one in starSurfaceOf
is gone. The Sun keeps its 1 whatever band it is filed under. Measured on the shipped catalogue:
of the 275 planets on those 265 hosts, 268 had an equilibrium temperature and 0 now do; before
the archive stars were added they had no host, and so none either.
Controls: without the guard, "has none from a magnitude no survey measured, and gives its planets
no temperature from it" fails (with the radius test beside it, 2 of 777); without the Sun's
exemption, "is 1 for the Sun, whatever its magnitude is filed under" fails (1 of 777).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every star but the Sun was a flat disc of one colour, and the Sun wore the texture pack's orange
photograph, lit by the same white light as every other star's planets.
Every star now shares one TSL material (starSurfaceMaterial in the scene): the Sun's map in grey,
times the colour of a blackbody at the star's temperature, times a linear limb-darkening law,
1 - 0.6 (1 - mu), the Sun's coefficient in the visible. The temperature is the one the radius
uses: the archive's st_teff for a host, else the dwarf sequence at its colour or type, else
the Sun's.
The colour comes from blackbodyColor (stellar.ts): Kim et al.'s cubic fit to the Planckian locus,
then CIE XYZ to linear sRGB, brightest channel 1. At D65 it gives 2 900 K (255, 180, 103), 5 800 K
(255, 241, 235) and 9 600 K (208, 219, 255), against (255, 182, 98), (255, 241, 231) and
(211, 221, 255) in Charity's integrated blackbody table. The tint is a uniform, so the shader is
built once and not per system.
The star's PointLight takes the same colour against the Sun's, since the planets' photographs
were taken in sunlight: the Sun's light stays white at pi, TRAPPIST-1's (2 566 K) is
(1, 0.44, 0.10) and Proxima's (2 900 K) (1, 0.52, 0.17), Sirius's (0.52, 0.67, 1). The intensity
stays pi. No halo comes back.
sun.jpg was 2048 by 1024 and 822 427 bytes for a disc that reaches 216 px across at the Sun's
closest approach on a 1080-line screen. It is now 1024 by 512 in grey, 31 306 bytes, which covers
the disc to a 1440-line screen. Its brightness varied by 56 % rms, which made every star a mottled
rock; it is rescaled to 14 % rms about the display's white, of the order of the Sun's granulation
contrast, the brighter half clipped as in a photograph exposed for the disc (6 % rms remains).
Measured on the dev server (1600 by 1000, the camera at its closest approach):
- the disc's brightness against the law, from r/R 0.52 to 0.97: Sun 0.970/0.841/0.763/0.657/0.560
against 0.927/0.829/0.755/0.645/0.554, ups And and Sirius the same to within 0.05;
- the disc's centre in sRGB: Sun (245, 233, 226), ups And (F8V, 6 157 K) (249, 239, 239),
Sirius (199, 209, 243);
- the first system entry of a fresh page, three runs each in alternating blocks against the
previous commit: Sol's longest task 90 ms before, 86 ms after, two tasks over 50 ms in every
run either way; Proxima Centauri's none over 50 ms after, one run of six with a 53 ms task
before. The long tasks on Sol's first entry predate this change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The system view drew the Sun at its own radius and every other star at 0.45 of its innermost
orbit, capped at 0.2 AU: a size chosen so the star would not swallow its planets, not the star's.
Proxima Centauri was drawn at 2.8 solar radii, eighteen times its own, and every star without
planets at 43.
starSurfaceOf (body-view-model.ts) now gives each star a radius and a temperature. A planet host
takes the archive's st_rad and st_teff from its planets' rows: 4 439 hosts are drawn at a
measured radius, 22 at a derived one. Every other star's is derived: its temperature off Pecaut & Mamajek's dwarf
sequence at its colour (the same table the spectral estimate reads, or at the colour its type
implies where it has none), its luminosity from its absolute magnitude and the bolometric
correction luminositySolar already applies, and R = sqrt(L) / (T / 5772 K)^2. Against the
archive's own st_rad for the 1 447 catalogue hosts that have one, the derived radius is within
0.018 dex at the median, 0.071 dex at the 90th percentile, and within a factor of 1.5 for
97.1 %. Sirius comes out 1.79 solar radii (1.711 published, Liebert et al. 2005), Wolf 359 0.117,
Betelgeuse 584, the Sun exactly 1.
A star with no band has only the ETL's stand-in magnitude, and gets no derived radius: PSR
J1719-1438 came out 2.3 solar radii from it, wider than its planet's orbit. With the stars that
have neither a colour nor a type, that leaves 3 077 of 455 608 stars (274 of 4 735 hosts) with
no radius; they are drawn at the Sun's, and their card gives none.
The card says which it is: "Radius 0.141 solar radii" for a published one, "~0.10 solar radii,
from colour and brightness" for a derived one, two figures because colour does not give three.
A giant drawn at its size can be wider than its system, so systemFramingDistanceAu also makes
room for the star, and the controls' closest approach is now three of the star's radii where
that is more than the old 0.05 AU. 23 211 stars are drawn wider than 3.6 solar radii, which put
0.05 AU inside three of their radii, and a zoom would have carried the camera through the
surface of the largest. The Sun keeps 0.05 AU. starMarkerRadiusAu and the renderer's innermost
axis, which only it read, are gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A star's luminosity was its absolute magnitude plus a bolometric correction read off its spectral
type, with its magnitude taken as V whatever band it was in. Gaia classifies none of its stars, so
all of its 379 000 got the Sun's correction, and their G was read as V: TRAPPIST-1 came out at a
seventh of its luminosity.
The dwarf sequence spectral.ts already reads types off (Pecaut & Mamajek 2013, table 5, online
version 2022.04.16) now carries its effective temperature, bolometric correction to V and Gaia
G-V columns, and dwarfSequenceAtColor interpolates them at a colour, in the colour's own system.
luminositySolar uses it wherever the star's colour is inside the table: the G magnitude is
carried to V, then corrected. Only without such a colour does it fall back to the spectral type,
as before.
Against the archive's own st_lum for the 1 449 hosts that are catalogue stars, the median error
goes from 0.038 to 0.022 dex and the 90th percentile from 0.292 to 0.115 dex; within a factor of
1.5, 84.5 % -> 93.8 %. For the 572 hosts Gaia describes: 90th percentile 0.332 -> 0.073 dex,
81.8 % -> 97.0 % within a factor of 1.5. Barnard's Star with no type now reads 0.0029 L_sun
against 0.0035 published, and TRAPPIST-1 7.3e-4 against 5.5e-4 (Agol et al. 2021).
Across the catalogue, 311 255 of 455 608 stars move by more than 10 % (median ratio 0.90: a
G-type star's G is 0.16 brighter than its V), and so do the hosts of 3 158 planets, whose
equilibrium temperatures follow as the fourth root.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The README listed the four columns stars-meta.bin had before a81dd49 added the photometry byte
(magnitude band, colour system, whether the distance is Gaia's) and the distance's relative
error.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The derived equilibrium temperature balanced starlight alone. For the widest orbits that is less
than the 2.7 K every body in space is held at by the cosmic microwave background. The planet 7 493
AU from 2MASS J21252752-8138278 read "Equilibrium temp. 1 K", and the one 19 000 AU out from UCAC4
328-061594 would have read 0 K.
equilibriumTemperatureK now adds the background as a second source in the same balance, T^4 =
T_star^4 + (2.7255 K)^4 (Fixsen 2009). Inside a few hundred AU of any star it changes nothing that
shows: Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune reproduce their published values as before. Across the
6 354 exoplanets, the rounded temperature changes for 11, all on orbits of 350 AU or more. Ten go
from 0, 1 or 2 K to 3 K, from VHS J125601.92-125723.9 b at 350 AU to UCAC4 328-061594 b at 19 000
AU, and 2MASS J22501512+2325342 b at 518 AU goes from 4 to 5 K. On the dev server, the detail
pages of the 7 493 AU planet and of GJ 900 b read "Equilibrium temp. 3 K".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The detail page and the system view's object card truncated the name and the line under it with
an ellipsis. For a designation, the part that went is the part that identifies it: the audit
measured "2MASS J21252752-8138278 b" at 288 px in a 256 px heading, shown as
"2MASS J21252752-81382…", and the eyebrow at 273 px, shown as "EXOPLANET · 2MASS J21252752-8138…".
Both lines now wrap (wrap-break-word) in both places. On the dev server the heading for that
planet is two lines, 45 px high, with its scroll width equal to its 256 px box, and the eyebrow
fits in 256 px.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2 127 stars, Sirius among them, read "Spectral type A0m...", in search rows, route options and
the star card. The mark is Hipparcos's own: every one of the 3 803 HYG rows ending in it has a HIP
number, and the catalogue ends a classification it does not print in full with it. The app
truncated nothing, but the text reads as if it had.
fetchStars now trims a trailing "..." from HYG's spectral types. The dictionary in
stars-index.json goes from 3 056 distinct types to 2 883, and from 598 dotted ones to none. The
names, sources and source indices are unchanged, and so is every other column of stars-meta.bin
bar the type indices. gzip -9 of the index goes from 4 015 865 to 4 015 205 bytes.
build.ts validateStars now fails a catalogue with any type ending in "...". Run with the trim
removed, the ETL failed on 2 127 such types. Two ETL runs from cache wrote identical
stars-meta.bin and stars-index.json.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
383 695 of the 455 608 stars read "Spectral type Unknown", every Gaia star among them, although
380 884 of them carry a colour. The card now gives those the type of the dwarf whose colour is
nearest, in the colour's own system, marked as an estimate: TRAPPIST-1, BP-RP 4.90, reads
"Spectral type ~M8, from colour", which is how it was classified (M8 V). A star with neither a
type nor a colour gets no subtitle rather than the literal "Unknown".
The colours are Pecaut & Mamajek's mean dwarf sequence (2013, ApJS 208, 9, table 5), as Mamajek
maintains it online (version 2022.04.16, which carries Gaia BP-RP), from B0 to M8.5. B-V cannot
tell O types apart (the whole sequence spans 0.03 of it), and BP-RP turns back past M8.5 and is
tabulated only from B9. A colour outside the table gets no estimate: 186 BP-RP and 41 B-V colours,
among them the blue Gaia DR3 5612323414549657984 at BP-RP -0.15.
380 657 stars get an estimate: F 97 840, G 144 327, K 105 984, M 29 142, A 3 272, B 92. Checked
against catalogued types:
- 19 433 HYG dwarfs with a B-V: 74.3 % within two subclasses, 95.5 % within five.
- 146 Gaia exoplanet hosts the archive types as dwarfs, from BP-RP: 88.4 % within two
subclasses, 98.6 % within five.
The estimate assumes a dwarf, so a giant reads later than it is (Pollux, K0 III at B-V 0.99,
reads K3). It also ignores reddening. The comment says both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
The off-screen rule for clicks was described in 3f0abf8 and in the pull request, but only its
comment was committed: pickAt still let the slop reach past the frame. The mutant that was said
to catch it matched nothing, and an unrelated flaky test failed instead. The frame test is now in
pickAt, before the slop, and its test fails without it (star at NDC 1.01, click at 0.995).
Venus, Uranus and Pluto turned forwards: Horizons states a retrograde spin twice, by a negative
rate and by an obliquity over 90 degrees, and both were applied. The period's sign is now used
only when no obliquity is known. Measured on the live markers, spin axis against orbit normal is
cos(obliquity) for each: Venus -0.999, Uranus -0.135, Pluto -0.494, Earth 0.917.
Moons listed as rates rather than "Synchronous" drifted about 5 degrees an orbit and Titan did not
turn: every moon is now locked at its Kepler period. Pluto's obliquity comes from IAU WGCCRE 2015,
Horizons gives none.
Also:
- the star's light is white at pi, not a warm 2.2 that left the photographs dim;
- procedural textures are 128x64, not 512x256 that froze the main thread ~60 ms a body;
- Io, Pluto, Titan and Deimos lose their "maps", which were disc photographs with black sky;
- an exoplanet with only a mass gets a radius from it (M^0.55, capped at Jupiter), not Earth's;
- the clock knows when it has left the present even once back at real time, so the date and
"Back to now" stay up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every body in the system view was an unlit sphere wearing a 32 by 16 pixel
procedural texture — the size chosen when a marker was a few pixels across and
what survived was its average colour. The thirteen real photographs in
`src/assets/textures/bodies/` were used only by the detail page. So Mars was a
pale grey ball with invented polar caps while its own NASA mosaic sat unread in
the repository, and nothing had a day side or a night side.
Each marker now takes its own photograph where one exists, at the size the
detail page uses, and the derived texture only where none does — the five moons
no probe mapped, and every exoplanet, none of which has ever been imaged. The
material is lit, and the light is a point at the star, so each world shows the
terminator where it really falls.
The light does not fall off with distance. Under the inverse square that real
light obeys, Neptune receives a thousandth of what Mercury does and reads as
black; the map is a set of worlds to look at rather than a light meter, so each
is lit as a photograph of it would be. That is the same concession the pixel
floor makes for size, and it is only about brightness: the *direction* is real.
Spheres are 32 by 24 rather than 16 by 12, since at true scale a body is drawn
anywhere from a pixel to the whole frame and the old silhouette was visibly
faceted at the near end.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The orbits and the rotations are both functions of a date, and the only date the
map ever asked for was this instant. So a view built on propagated ephemerides
showed a still picture: Earth turns 15 degrees an hour and takes a year to go
round, and a reader watching for a minute saw nothing move at all.
`TimeStore` is that date, at a rate the reader sets: real time, an hour a
second, a day a second, a month a second. It is read once a frame rather than
held in a signal — it changes continuously, and a signal changing sixty times a
second would ask the whole HUD to re-render for a number nothing is watching.
Changing the rate re-anchors rather than rewinding, so speeding up and slowing
down never jumps the sky, and "Back to now" returns to the world's own time.
Measured in the app, three seconds of watching in the Sun's system:
| rate | sky elapsed | Earth turned | Jupiter moved |
|---|---|---|---|
| real time | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 h/s | 3.0 h | 45.12 deg | 0.0009 AU |
| 1 d/s | 3.0 d | (three full turns) | 0.0222 AU |
45.12 degrees in three hours is 15.04 an hour, which is Earth's own sidereal
rate, and Jupiter's 0.0222 AU in three days is its own orbital speed.
The rates are radio buttons, not toggles: they are one of four, and the native
control carries that to a screen reader and to the arrow keys with no script.
The date joins the strip only while the clock is running faster than the world,
since at real time it is today's, which the reader's machine already says.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The view had one rotation in it — the planet on the detail page, at 0.08 rad/s,
a number with no source. Nothing in the system view turned at all.
The data was already on disk: every cached Horizons page carries how its body
spins, in one of five forms. The rate in radians per second is preferred where
it appears, because it is signed — that is how Venus and Uranus are known to
turn backwards — then a period in hours or days, then the `9h 55m 29.711 s`
the giant planets use, and finally the word every major moon here carries
instead of a number: Synchronous. A tidally locked moon's day is its orbit, so
Kepler supplies it from the elements already parsed and the parent it goes
round.
Seventeen of the eighteen bodies come out within 1% of their published period —
Earth 23.934 h, Jupiter 9.925 h, Venus -5832.5 h, Io 42.5 h, Callisto 400.5 h.
Titan is the exception: its page states no period at all, so it is left still
rather than turned at an invented rate.
The axis is the orbit normal tilted by the obliquity about the orbit's
ascending node, which is where an obliquity is measured from and the only line
in the orbit the elements name. The phase at the epoch is published for none of
these bodies, so the face turned toward the camera is not a claim; the rate and
the direction are.
At true rates nothing is visible moving — Earth turns 15 degrees an hour. A
clock the reader can run faster is the next piece, and the audit asks for it
anyway.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Three changes to what the system view claims, all of them the same claim: that
the sizes on screen mean something.
**The halo is gone.** It was a sprite sized against the arrival frame — 1.12 AU
for the Sun — so it stayed that wide as the camera closed in and ended up a flat
gradient filling the screen, over the photograph it was meant to dress. It
existed to keep the star visible at a framing that holds the whole system, which
is now handled in pixels instead.
**Bodies are drawn at their own radius.** The old marker size was exaggerated
and scaled to the system span, and clamped: Jupiter and Ganymede both ran past
the ceiling and were drawn at one radius, so every moon orbited inside its
planet, and Phobos and Triton sat entirely within Mars and Neptune. True scale
needs no rule against that — physics already puts a moon outside the planet it
orbits. What it costs is visibility at the arrival framing, where every body is
sub-pixel, so the scene floors each marker at 3 px on screen and holds a moon to
half its planet's drawn size. Measured in the Sun's system: at arrival, planets
3 px and moons 1.5 px, against 3 px for everything before; at Jupiter, the
planet 10.8 px at scale 1 with the Galilean moons on their orbits outside it.
The Sun is drawn at its own radius too. Every other star keeps a size derived
from its innermost orbit, because no stellar radius reaches the app — Gaia's
`radius_gspphot` is the obvious next fetch.
**A click cannot enter a system that is not on screen.** The picker tested depth
but not the frame, and a star's hit area is its drawn size plus a slop, so a
click in the last pixels of the view could fly into a system outside it, with
nothing on screen to explain where it had gone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Both sides added a test beside the other in the dock's spec: the panel's own
departure guard here, the give-up wording on main. Both kept, and the offer test
carries the `least` the route answer now has.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The span went to `distanceRings` as the target's straight-line distance from the
Sun, but a ring of radius r passes within |r - p| of the view's centre, where p
is how far out that centre is *along* the galactic plane. For a target above the
plane the two differ by its height, so the band was centred on a radius no ring
has — and `ringLabels` picks its bearing by comparing its own in-plane distance
against the innermost ring, a comparison the new first ring quietly broke.
Two comments and a constant, from the same review. A frame short of the survey
edge gets its callout only when its last ring overshoots it: 245 pc does, 235 pc
does not, which is now a test rather than a sentence. The ring count can reach
16, not 14, now that the span need not start at the Sun. And a ring label was
measured as 135 px of star name when "50 pc" is a third of that, which rejected
rungs a hand's breadth clear of the name: RING_LABEL_REACH_NDC, 0.23, is the
widest of them — "1.5 kpc" with "Survey edge" under it.
Three mutants, three caught. Measured again in the app: unchanged for a star in
the plane (4 labels at 20 pc above it, 7 at 2 pc), and the rings now follow the
plane for one 195 pc above it rather than ringing a place the grid does not
reach.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The fixture built for "exactly MAX_VISITED stars reachable" was 338 short: its
random cloud leaves clumps the departure never reaches (the LCG gives 12 212
distinct positions for 39 999 stars), so the search settled 39 662 and the
pre-fix code answered `gaveUp: false` too. The test could not fail on the code
it was written to pin — and the mutant that seemed to prove otherwise was
failing to compile, not failing the test. It is now a line of 40 000 a parsec
apart with the island off the line: settled 40 000 exactly, 115 ms, and the
pre-fix code does report a give-up. Both mutants now compile and are caught.
The give-up cap also has to hold while the bisection has earned nothing: the
exception added for that case had no bound at all, so a search could spend the
resolution's own eight full-budget probes — about 17 s of "Plotting…" — where
two used to cost 4 s. Bounded at five. On the repo's crowded-knot fixture:
1.9 s for the unearned ceiling figure with the old cap, 7.2 s for a range the
bisection earned, and five probes is where that lands.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Gating it on `jobsQuery` switched it off for every override that *widens* the
query — which is the only way to fill `select top N` at all. `ETL_GAIA_MAGNITUDE_LIMIT=14`
asks for 500 000 rows, the sky holds more, and the answer is the limit rather
than the filters: exactly what the tripwire is for, and it no longer fired. It
now reads the row limit itself, so only a deliberately smaller slice is silent.
Measured with a synthetic answer of exactly 500 000 rows in the cache, under the
key the widened query hashes to: refused. With the `jobsQuery` gate back, the
same run keeps 500 000 Gaia stars and goes on to publish them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
`canPlot()` guarded the Plot button and not `raiseTo`, which is the other way
into `plot()`. So with a departure typed but never chosen, clicking "1.8 pc
would reach." moved the range control and plotted nothing: the panel then read
"No route at this range. 1.8 pc would reach." beside a control already set to
1.8. The offer carries the same `disabled` as the button, since it is the same
request by another route.
And the departure guard is trimmed, as the scene trims the same text before
offering matches for it: one space in the field left it looking empty, with no
suggestions to pick from, and Plot dead for no reason on screen.
Measured in the app, from inside Barnard's Star with Sirius as the destination:
offer enabled with the field empty, disabled once "Sol" is typed and never
chosen — a forced click then moves nothing — and enabled again when the field is
cleared, where it raises the range to 2.40 pc and plots 7 jumps.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The rings are centred on the Sun and the frame need not be. Sizing their step
from how far the frame reaches — 210 pc for a star at 190 with the camera 20 pc
back — gives 20 pc rings at 180 and 200, both outside a frame 19 pc deep, so a
view away from the Sun still had no ring on it and no ladder of labels either.
`distanceRings` now takes the span the frame covers rather than its far edge,
and the step is a fifth of that: 5 pc rings from 165 to 210 for the same view.
Measured in the app, centred on a star 187 pc out in the galactic plane: 4 ring
labels drawn 20 pc above the plane and 7 from 2 pc, against 1 and none before.
The clearance was a radius around the anchor, and a label is a line of text
hanging 135 px to one side of its anchor: at 0.065 NDC apart, past the radius,
"50 pc" printed inside "Alpha Centauri". It is now tested against the span the
name occupies, on the side it hangs, with the radius kept for the pair whose
text runs the other way.
Also from the review: the ladder in the clearance test was built at exactly the
constant it tests, so 1057 of 2000 camera poses would have decided it by float
round-trip error — the rungs now sit 0.02 either side of the rule. And two
comments that were wrong: a frame one step short of the survey edge does get its
callout, and CSS2DRenderer hides a label behind the camera rather than drawing
it at the page edge.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The panel printed "No route at this range." beside the range it was offering —
which is the sentence this branch exists to stop it printing. It was gated on
there being no offer, and a search that gives up usually has one: Sol to
HD 120147 at 4.5 pc spends the budget, offers 4.83 pc, and says there is no
route where a 71-jump route exists. The wording now follows the search at the
range that was asked for, and nothing else.
That needs the two give-ups kept apart, so `least` travels beside `gaveUp` to
the panel: one says the asked range was not searched out, the other that the
search for a range that would work was. HIP 69445 at 3 pc — asked-range search
exhaustive in 44 ms, ceiling probe out of budget — used to read "Too many stars
to search at this range." and now reads "No route at this range.", with nothing
claimed after it.
Two more from the same review. The budget flag was read off the settled count,
so a search that proved a dead end with the last star it was allowed reported a
give-up; it now records why the loop stopped. And the bisection's cap could fire
before a single probe had narrowed anything, leaving the ceiling route's own
longest hop as the answer: star 1000115173 at 3 pc was told to go to 8.00 pc,
the control's maximum, for a crossing that works at 6. It now offers 6.93.
Measured in the app, all three: "Too many stars to search at this range.
4.90 pc would reach.", "No route at this range." alone, and 7.00 pc in place of
8.00. The duplicated dead-end test now asks the question it was named for —
exactly the budget's worth of stars reaching each other and none of them the
destination — and each fix kills its own mutant.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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
Both make a search spend its whole 40 000-star budget, twice over in the bisection, and the
CI runner timed out at the default five seconds. The crowds are now indexed in cells sized for the
ranges asked of them, as the real catalogue is, and the two tests carry their own 30 s timeout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
From the review of #24. Two defects, both in a real browser.
The panel keeps its entries across a trip to another tab, but still replayed the acquire wipe on
the way back, and for the 380 ms that runs, its clip path swallows clicks: type "Siri", leave for
Readout, come back and click the Sirius suggestion, and the click lands on the star field behind
it — measured, the element under the pointer is the canvas, and the field stays "Siri". The wipe is
gone from this one panel: it is not acquiring anything it did not already have.
The departure field fell back to the star the view is in whenever nothing had been chosen, text in
the field or not. So a field reading "Sol" that was never resolved plotted from Barnard's Star:
"1 Barnard's Star, 2 Sol, 3 Sirius", the panel naming one departure and the route leaving from
another. Text nobody chose is no longer a departure, and the button waits until it is one or the
field is empty again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
From the review of #19. The rings are distances from the Sun, but their step was taken from
`effectiveDistance`, which under the plan view means the extent of the frame rather than how far
the camera is from the Sun. Centred on a star 200 pc out and flipped to 2D, the grid became rings
of 2 to 20 pc: not one of them on screen. The step now comes from where the view is centred plus
how far the camera is orbiting it, which is the same distance under either projection.
The set was also rebuilt while the grid was hidden, and every rebuild disposes the rings and
builds every vertex again; it now happens only while the grid is drawn.
The ring labels went straight to the overlay: never culled to the frame, and free to land on a
star's name. They now have to be on screen and clear of the names already placed, by half the
separation two names keep — they are a ladder up one ray a twentieth of the screen apart, and
holding them apart from each other would take "Survey edge" off the map.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The route search stops after MAX_VISITED stars and returned null, which everything downstream read
as "the catalogue holds no chain". On the real catalogue that was wrong for real questions: Sol to
HD 120147 (136 pc) at 5 pc is 50 jumps, and the panel said there was no route. The budget also sat
under what the shipped catalogue needs, so it is now 40 000 rather than 20 000: both that route and
a star at 170 pc are found, and Sol to HD 2626 at 6 pc, which used to be refused after 4.7 s, plots
56 jumps in about 2 s.
A search now reports whether it gave up. The range search no longer counts a give-up as proof that
nothing routes below it — that is what reported ranges up to 29% too wide — and it stops after two
of them, since those are the probes that cost the most and settle the least: for HD 2626 at 3 pc it
offers 5.92 pc in about 4 s, against 6.13 pc in 4.7 s. At the panel's widest range the refused route
and the range search are the same question, so it is asked once. Where nothing can be said, the
panel says "Too many stars to search at this range." rather than claiming there is no route.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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
- The budget counted CSS pixels; lines are drawn in device pixels, so a screen scaled to 150% or
200% drew 1.5-2x the calibrated line. It now counts the canvas's drawn pixels.
- A graph was re-asked only when the drawn stars changed, so with a star budget covering the whole
catalogue, or a resize, its budget and centre stayed wherever the layer was turned on. A view that
chose its stars again now asks, and a graph is rebuilt when the stars, the range or the budget
changed (the budget by more than half the margin, or its centre by more than 5 pc).
- From inside a system the budget was worked out in astronomical units about the system's origin.
Graphs are now asked for in parsec space only; the flight back out asks.
- Comparing budgets let a request re-asked with a slightly different one supersede its twin, and the
twin's rejection cleared the state of the request that replaced it. A rejection now clears it only
for the latest request.
- The worker sorted every link to keep a few thousand, 2.2x an unbudgeted build. It now bands links
by distance, keeps every band before the one the budget runs out in, and sorts only that one:
142-168 ms on the real catalogue against 233-388 ms, 103 ms unbudgeted, returning early when all fit.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
With the drawn set following the view, the layer at 8 pc cost the integrated Radeon 503 ms a frame
at 30 pc from the Sun. Measured, the cost follows the length of line on screen (about 10 ms per
million pixels near the Sun), not the number of links: 100 000 links were 12 ms at the opening
view, 25 000 were 61 ms at 30 pc. So the budget is a length: a million pixels, turned into parsecs
at the depth the view is centred on, spent on the links nearest that centre by their nearer end.
Orbiting with links at 8 pc on the iGPU: 12-18 ms p50 at every pose measured, no long tasks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
- Flights: the drawn stars were checked once a label pass, and a flight outruns that. Leaving a
system jumps the camera to face another way, then zooms out forty-fold in a second: 74-83% of
the stars that belong on screen were missing on the first frames back in parsec space, 33-50%
before each re-choice on the way out. While the rig animates, the check now runs every frame.
Probe on real flights (Gl 806, Barnard's Star, out): 0.90-1.00 of a fresh choice drawn on
screen in flight, 1.00 on the frame of the jump; frame p95 12.2 ms, no long tasks. Choosing for
the whole sky during flights was tried first and measured worse (0.15-0.18).
- Portrait frames: the turn and pan limits use the narrower half-extent, not the height.
- Links: a new drawn set arms the rebuild timer only when none is pending, so a continuous orbit
gets a graph at most every 250 ms instead of never; an unchanged set asks for nothing.
- The centre-move test lets the first pass happen before moving the centre.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Graph requests were never shared, on the grounds that the scene never asks for the same graph
twice. It does: turning the layer off and on while the worker is busy asks again for the graph
already waiting. The new request superseded the old one, and the old one's rejection handler,
which finds its request by range and drawn list, wiped the state of the new one: the layer stayed
on with no graph. An identical request now shares the outstanding promise, a graph being the same
when its range matches and its drawn list is the very same array.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The drawn set was two spheres, around the view's centre and around the Sun, then the brightest
stars anywhere, so most of the budget sat behind or beside the camera: at 30 pc from the Sun
15.8% of the drawn stars were on screen, at 5 pc 9.1%, in a plan view zoomed to 10 pc 3.8%.
The same tiers are now taken only from the camera's frame, widened by a quarter
(VIEW_MARGIN), with the planet hosts in view drawn first after the pinned stars, so every ring
circles a star that can be clicked. The set is chosen again at the label cadence once the view
has turned, zoomed or moved half the margin, switched projection or been resized, and once for
the whole sky on the way out to the Galaxy. Drawn stars on screen: 74-76% at 30 pc, 73-75% at
5 pc, 66% in the zoomed plan view, 91.5% at the opening view.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Same stars in the same order, for less: one walk of the brightness index, reading positions laid
out in that order, sorts the view's neighbourhood, the Sun's and the rest as it goes, instead of
gathering both neighbourhoods in catalogue order and sorting them. A refocus in the page drops
from 11.3 ms to 4.6 ms (median; worst 19.1 to 7.1). This comes before the drawn set follows the
camera's turns, which makes refocusing far more frequent.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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 panel was unmounted with its tab, so leaving it reset departure, destination and range. The
range reset was also a lie: the slider came back at 3 pc while the scene kept drawing the graph at
the range last chosen. The panel now stays mounted and is hidden while another tab is open, which
still replays the acquire wipe when it is shown again.
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
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
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
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
The specs added over this series each opened with an untimed check that the
canvas was there, which gives it Playwright's default five seconds. That is
the one wait in this suite that cannot be made faster: eight workers share a
software rasterizer, and what they are all waiting on is the same first paint.
Under a full parallel run five seconds is a coin toss, and it came up wrong on
the route-plotting spec.
Thirty, like every other wait in here that crosses a camera flight.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Two findings, both right, and the second was the feature not doing what its own
commit message said.
The depth range stopped being updated under a plan view. It is worked out in
perspective terms — near from the distance, far from eight times it — and the
orthographic camera derives its own range from that one, so skipping the
calculation left the far plane wherever it had been when the projection
changed. Flying out to the whole Galaxy from a plan view clipped away most of
it. The range is written to the perspective camera whichever one is live now,
and the plan view goes on deriving from it every frame.
And the galaxy-scale plan looked down the celestial pole. "The plane the
current scale is read against" is this system's orbital plane inside a system,
and the galactic plane outside one — but the fallback was the scene's own z,
which is the Earth's rotation axis. The normal is the north galactic pole now,
and up is the direction of the galactic centre, so a plan of the Galaxy is
laid out the way the model that draws it is described. The arms are face-on.
Verified: build clean, 596/596 unit, 16/16 end-to-end, and the Milky Way
photographed flat from 28.3 kpc with nothing clipped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
The Sun's catalogue id is 0, and the readout's keep control was shown by
`@if (keepableStarId(); as starId)` — which reads zero as "there is no star
here". Of the six hundred and thirty-four systems the map can be inside, the
one nobody could keep was Sol.
Checked against null now, with a test that keeps star zero, because this is the
sort of thing that comes back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Carries the shared reference-viewport module and the cached card lookup up from
the branch they were reviewed on, and answers the one comment left against this
one.
The orthographic branch of the star field's hit test multiplied the angular size
by the frustum's half-height and then divided the result by that same
half-height. The two cancel: `setProjection` had already sized the sprite as
`angular * halfHeight / tan(REFERENCE_FOV/2)`, so dividing back out by the
half-height leaves the reference field of view and nothing else. Both
projections are one formula over a different angle now — which is also one
fewer division by a number that is zero if the frustum ever degenerates.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Two of the three comments were worth taking.
The star field and the rings drawn over it each carried their own copy of the
reference viewport and field of view the angular sizes are figured against.
They agree today, and nothing would have told anyone when they stopped: a ring
would just sit a little wide of its star at some window sizes. One module now
holds the three constants and says what they are for.
The leader line to the object card looked the card's panel up by selector on
every frame it was drawn. The host element is stable and the panel inside it
only changes when a different body is selected, so the lookup is derived once
per change instead of sixty times a second.
Left alone: replacing `positions.set([x, y, z], i * 3)` with an index-by-index
loop to avoid a temporary array per host. It runs once, over six hundred and
thirty-four stars, at bootstrap, and the version with the temporary reads
better than the version without.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
Every figure this map shows is a measurement or something derived from one,
and it says which. What it could not do was tell you what a place is — a
radius and an eccentricity do not say that Titan is the only moon with a dense
atmosphere. An About control on a body's panel now fetches the Wikipedia lead,
and it is labelled as what it is: prose from another site, credited and linked
back, below the line where this map's own figures end.
Only on the press. Nothing is fetched while a body loads, and nothing is
fetched twice.
Three things the encyclopedia does that had to be handled, all found by asking
it rather than by guessing:
It redirects, generously — "Proxima Cen b" lands on "Proxima Centauri b" and
"Kepler-22 b" on "Kepler-22b" — so the catalogue's own names can be sent as
they are, with no mapping table to maintain.
It disambiguates. "Titan" is a list of everything called Titan, and so are
"Mercury" and "Io". Wikipedia says so in the response, and this app happens to
know the kind, so a disambiguation is retried as "Titan (moon)". Only in
English: every wiki words its own qualifiers, and inventing a translation of
one would be inventing an article title.
And it rate-limits, which it did to me while I was checking the above. A
refusal to answer is not an empty answer, so the two are separate outcomes:
"Wikipedia has no article on this" is about the world, "Wikipedia could not be
reached" is about this minute — and only the first is remembered, so a second
press is allowed to try again.
The extract is capped and scrollable. A lead can run a dozen lines, and this
panel is anchored to the top of a viewport that may be shorter than the prose.
Verified: build clean, 606/606 unit including twelve for the lookup chain, 16/16
end-to-end including three that stub the encyclopedia — this suite tests the
panel, not Wikipedia — design detector clean, and the real thing exercised by
hand against Earth, Titan and Proxima Cen b at three viewport sizes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_016jxMkwA2rbicdGxHosecYi
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
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
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.
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
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
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5.5