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>
SenrokaiandClaude Opus 5
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