Notes from the
observatory.
How Orbit renders the sky, what we break while trying, and the occasional thing we find up there.
Rendering the sky in 98 milliseconds
Why we threw away our first two renderers, and the layer-order trick that finally made the frame cheap enough.
Drawing uncertainty without lying
Confidence is a visual language, not a tooltip. How we show what the map doesn't know.
Three drifting moons and no explanation
We logged an anomaly in the outer ring data. Six weeks later, we still can't fully account for it.
Per-pixel scaling for a rigid composition
One CSS variable, one reference render, and every offset measured from it. No magic numbers left behind.
Why our stars twinkle on purpose
Real stars only twinkle because of the air between us. We decided to keep the effect anyway — here's the argument.
Five years, forty-one people, one question
What we've learned building an instrument for looking up, and what we're still getting wrong.
A nine-second loop that never stutters
Autoplay is unreliable, silent video is fragile, and mobile browsers lie. The four events we listen for instead.
Cataloguing asteroids you can't see
Most of what Orbit draws is inference. Here's how we decide when an inferred object deserves a label.
We ship on Thursdays now
A small process change that cut our rollback rate, and the one rule we will not break for anyone.