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The relativistic sky

Sunholo
Sunholo
Stapledon's Voyage team

The sky out of the window is now the real one: 335,157 stars over the Milky Way, exposed for a dark-adapted human eye, with the cosmic background glowing ahead at extreme speeds.

What's new​

  • Starfield v2 (#67): 335,157 stars from CNS5, Gaia GCNS and Hipparcos, instanced on the GPU, with float64 positions rebased around the ship.
  • The Milky Way behind them: the NOIRLab panorama with the catalogue's own stars removed, so stars are not counted twice, Doppler shifted texel by texel.
  • A naked-eye exposure (#75, #80): stars in lux and the sky in cd/m², calibrated so the faintest visible star lands at V 6.9 (Crumey's model says 6.897). The HUD always says how it is exposing; the readability aids are off by default and labelled.
  • The forward CMB glow (#79, fixed in #88): above γ ≈ 150 the 2.7 K microwave background, blueshifted, shows up dead ahead; at γ 707 it is a 3,853.7 K blackbody.
γ 20 to 707 through a 20° lens: the stars crowd into a shrinking ball, then the forward CMB warms from deep red to near white.

Not yet​

M1's acceptance step (M1.5b) is still open: the reference renders at five speeds and the 60 fps bench at 1440p with everything on. See the roadmap.