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Draft copy — pending review

star field · telescope

Telescope

A shipped web planetarium that renders roughly 9,000 real stars for a visitor’s location and time — with a beautiful 3D sky and an accessible path into the same astronomy.

The story

  1. problem

    The sky without the intimidation

    Textbook charts are flat, planetarium software can be heavy, and phone apps often assume the learner already knows what they are seeing. Telescope starts with the sky itself: personal, immediate, and explorable before an account is ever required.

  2. build

    Astronomy beneath a thin renderer

    Pure, unit-tested sky-math, time-controller, star-catalog, and zipcode modules do the hard work. React Three Fiber renders the result inside a celestial dome; astronomy-engine places the Sun, Moon, and planets. Instanced points keep roughly 9,000 Yale Bright Star Catalog objects fluid.

  3. result

    A real sky, ready to learn

    The shipped product supports location, time travel, constellation lessons, favorites, and a searchable keyboard- and screen-reader-friendly alternative to the 3D scene. A Hipparcos cross-match raised star-distance coverage from 34% to more than 99%.

Plates

  • Draft plate of Telescope rendering a local night sky above a compass horizon.
    Draft plate — the local sky and horizon. Replace with a live capture.
  • Draft plate of Telescope connecting constellation line art to a mythology lesson.
    Draft plate — constellation discovery flowing into a lesson. Replace with a live capture.

Live from GitHub

Commits
2
Last active
  • TypeScript
  • MDX
  • JavaScript
  • CSS

Read from the GitHub API at build time.

Stack

  • Next.js
  • React
  • Three.js
  • React Three Fiber
  • astronomy-engine
  • Postgres