News
Posts about building the 3D solar system viewer and the science it tries to render. Dev journal entries and longer space writeups land here.
How the Solar System live wallpaper works. A window that lives under your desktop icons, the whole engine bundled inside the app, a frame cap that keeps it calm all day, and planets framed off to one side so your files have room.
The galaxy you can pull back to in the viewer is now about 230,000 stars and thousands of glowing and dusty clouds placed in 3D, built from published measurements and colored against photographs of other spiral galaxies. It took three attempts.
The true-scale screensaver now runs on Windows as a proper .scr and on Linux as a small app that watches for idle, and one purchase covers Mac, Windows and Linux. How each one was built, and the odd corners of both.
The aurora on the viewer's Earth now follows NOAA's real Kp index and OVATION forecast, the Sun shows NOAA's latest numbered sunspot regions, and new aurora pages and email alerts work out where you can see it using proper magnetic latitudes.
VR mode in the headset browser now puts you in low Earth orbit at true scale, takes you to anything in the solar system, stands you inside the ISS Cupola and lets you fly with a cockpit round you. How it works, and why depth was the hard part.
Land at Apollo 15's site, unfold the ramp and drive the Prospector rover across real lunar terrain built from LOLA laser altimetry, with wheel tracks and dust that flies without air.
Fly mode now has an Elite-style galaxy map of every catalogued star within 200 light years of the Sun. Plot a route, engage the drive, and arrive at Sirius or Alpha Centauri through hyperspace.
How far the Sun and every planet are from Earth today, how long their light takes to reach us, and how the site works those numbers out live in your browser from JPL orbital elements.
How the Solar System screensaver works. Every planet where it really is right now, framings lit by the real Sun, and close-ups that stop exactly where the planet's surface map runs out of detail.
The Mars Rover scene puts a lander and rover on the floor of Jezero Crater. Thin air, a third of Earth's gravity, dust that drifts and a sky the color of butterscotch.
Rocketry mode is a Kerbal-style build, launch and orbit game inside the 3D solar system. True-scale Earth, real orbital speed, staging, a navball and a map with manoeuvre nodes, no install.
Nine months of building a real-time 3D solar system in the browser, and the specific things that turned out to matter. Seams, boot budgets, duplicate PNGs, and why SSIM lied to me.
What this blog is going to be. Part dev journal, part space notebook, written in public.