Owner decision 2026-10-06: the globe tells its numbers where they belong instead of in a table. instruments.js adds
one three.js group to globe.gl's scene and a DOM overlay of chips:
- the Sun: a ray and a bead over the subsolar point (with the irradiance), the day/night line, the golden hour and
the three twilights, the declination, the noon and midnight meridian, and the analemma at this hour, its stretch to
the next equinox or solstice brighter;
- a focused post's place: its horizon, its Sun's line and height, and its day lit on its latitude, with one chip for
the place, the phase, the solar time, the elevation and the day's length;
- the tropics and polar circles (the axial tilt), the CDN ring, the view's centre and spread, and rings around the
posts in view;
- a small orrery in the top left corner, re-anchored to the camera before each render, with the Earth–Sun distance,
the seasons, the next equinox or solstice and the next perihelion or aphelion stacked under it;
- the frame rate as a ring around the globe; the rest (points, textures, countries, renderer) as a legend.
The chips are placed after each frame globe.gl draws, clear of each other, the moment's caption, the orrery and the
legend, and slide back inside the canvas at its edge; country names keep clear of them. Geometry changes only inside
a wake globe.js already made, so an idle globe still draws nothing. three.js's classes come from globe.gl's own
objects, looked for before each render until its globe is in the scene. A phone's banner draws the day/night line
and the subsolar point; full screen draws everything, and a globe built in the banner now moves its camera back when
opened full screen.
GlobePanel loses both tooltips and the one-second poll that read every post into a table; the Sun's rows stay as
screen-reader text, and a failed start says so. Seven keys only the tooltips used are gone.
GlobeTests (desktop with a located post written from Milano and pinned, in both themes and turned to the subsolar
point; a phone's banner, full screen and back; an idle globe drawing no frame) pass. Under SwiftShader the instruments
cost 1–3 ms of a ~50 ms frame and under 0.1 ms of script; FeedPerfTests' heaps are unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
The Sun lights the globe where it really is (wwwroot/js/sun.js, the Astronomical Almanac's low-precision solar
coordinates): the day map shaded by the Sun's height and the Earth–Sun distance, warm city lights on the night side,
and a twilight blend about 13° wide between them. It shows now, refreshed every 30 s, or the moment of the hovered,
focused or pinned post: a click on a card pins it, and the subsolar point travels there the shorter way round. The
panel's top corner shows that moment, the phase of the day and solar time at the post's place, and the season in its
hemisphere (or in both, for a post without a place). Its tooltip shows the subsolar point, declination, axial tilt,
distance, irradiance, day length and the next equinox or solstice.
Land borders are thin paths. Country names are in the reader's language and appear as the camera comes closer:
largest countries first, away from the globe's edge, never overlapping. They come from world-atlas 2.0.2 (Natural
Earth 1:50m), prepared by tools/globe/prepare-countries.py, and are vendored with their hashes in SOURCES.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
The globe is a UV sphere: towards the poles its triangles narrow to
slivers, and texture coordinates interpolated across them pinched the
map into a star around each pole. Each pixel now computes its own
coordinates from its exact point on the sphere, with seam-safe mipmap
gradients; the map wraps horizontally and gets 8x anisotropic
filtering.
That showed a flaw in the day texture: NASA's mosaic has a lighter
strip at its east edge near the poles, a line from each pole once drawn
exactly. The day texture is now built from NASA's original Blue Marble
(December 2004) by tools/globe/prepare-day-texture.py, which blends
that strip into the map where both sides of the seam agree; same
4096x2048 size, provenance and hashes in SOURCES.md.
globe.gl redrew 60 times a second even when nothing moved; it now draws
only during camera flights, hover pulses, auto-rotation and the
reader's drags, so an idle globe costs no GPU time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
globe.gl 2.46.2 (MIT, three.js r185 bundled) and the NASA Blue Marble
and Black Marble textures from three-globe 2.45.3, copied once from the
npm registry; SOURCES.md records versions, licences and sha256, and the
bundled libraries' notices are in LICENSES-bundled.txt. The service
worker leaves the folder out of the offline precache: the feed loads it
the first time it shows the globe.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LsXgEaXee4GCU1hwYgPJXw
thepraandClaude Opus 5.5